NeoOffice 3.1.2 Security and Stability Improvements

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Revision as of 20:51, 22 August 2010

In September 2010 we plan to release NeoOffice 3.1.2 with the following security and stability improvements:

Temporary files are encrypted when FileVault is enabled

By default, NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code creates temporary files in your machine's /tmp folder. While this may not be a problem for most users, for users who have enabled FileVault /tmp is an insecure, unencrypted folder. Since NeoOffice's temporary files may contain data from a user's documents, NeoOffice now creates temporary files in a folder within the user's Home folder so that such files are automatically encrypted when FileVault is enabled.

Fix for bugs that cause embedded images to be lost after saving Writer or Impress documents

In the last few months, we have seen several reports that in some cases embedded images are lost after saving and reopening Writer or Impress documents. This problem has been reported in NeoOffice as well as in the two products that NeoOffice is based on: Oracle's OpenOffice.org and Novell's Go-oo.

Although this problem is very difficult to reproduce, we found and fixed the following two bugs that can cause images to be lost after saving Writer and Impress documents:

• Saving Writer documents - Images are lost in some cases where autorecovery is turned on, an autorecovery save occurs, and then the document is manually saved after the autorecovery save has finished.

• Saving Impress documents - Images are lost in some cases when Mac OS X deletes files in the system temporary folder. Mac OS X periodically deletes files in certain folders if they are more than a couple days old and if an Impress document is open for a couple of days, this periodic Mac OS X process will delete the temporary image files that NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org use to store embedded images in open Impress documents and once these temporary files are deleted, the embedded images in an open Impress document are lost.

Special thanks go to all who have donated to the NeoOffice.org project since we released NeoOffice 3.1.1. Without everyone's donations, not only would we have been unable to implement these speed and stability improvements, we would not have been able to provide rapid investigation and fixing of all of the critical bugs found by users.