I read an interesting article this morning on software security. There are some key learnings here. One of the is the suggestion that the Open Office people should have learned from some of the problems that Microsoft has already had and worked to solve. My opinion has long been that the smart people learn from other people's mistakes. Anyone can learn from their own. Security in software is a big deal but it is all too often ignored when teaching programming or software development in universities. I think this is a big problem. Not an easy one to solve but somehow we have to find a way.

In any case it is very easy to fall into the trap of assuming that since you - the programmer - are only interested in doing good an making things easy for the user that everyone else out there is going to "play nice" with the software you write. Like it or not there are people out there who like to make trouble for fun or for profit. So be careful out there.