OLE Security Patch for Mac Office 98 -- Microsoft Corporation has released an OLE update for English language versions of Microsoft Office 98 designed to prevent OLE applications from storing extraneous data - possibly including email, financial data, or other sensitive information - within document files. (See "Oil of OLE: Document Security and You" in TidBITS-437 for a complete description of the problem.) Although the revised version of OLE corrects the extraneous data problem for all applications that use OLE (including PageMaker and previous versions of Office applications), Microsoft's updater requires the Microsoft Office First Run application to install the files. As a result, unless you have Microsoft Office 98, this updater apparently cannot be used to install the revised version of OLE for use with other applications. At this point, it's unknown whether Microsoft plans to release a stand-alone update to OLE, or make the fix available to other application developers who use OLE. The update is available in MacBinary (3.3 MB) or BinHex (4.5 MB) formats, and it also includes a previously released fix for Visual Basic for Applications that corrected a problem with the Office 98's Memo and Resume Wizards. [GD]

<http://www.microsoft.com/macoffice/productinfo/ 98dl/offi98patch.htm>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/04973>