Microsoft Word

A coordinated disclosure describes prompt injection in Copilot for Word: a document can hide instructions in white-on-white text, influence a generated report, then cause Copilot to copy those instructions into the output. That output becomes the next carrier when someone uses it as source material.

The uncomfortable shift is from a bad attachment to a poisoned internal artifact. The author says Microsoft reproduced the broader class after multiple mitigations; the immediate defensive rule is to treat external files as untrusted context, not just untrusted downloads.

Sci-fi novelist Robert J. Sawyer keeps writing in WordStar because its commands sit under a touch typist's fingers and it never interrupts — 'I'm in control, not the program.' George R.R. Martin and Anne Rice agreed; Rice called Word 'pure madness' beside it.

The thread reframes the appeal as distraction-defense, not nostalgia. One writer switched to a typewriter to stop staring at a screen. Another nailed it: the longing isn't for the software, it's for the quiet.

Microsoft's Raymond Chen wrote a belated obituary for Tony Krueger, who made spell-check run quietly in the background and drew the red squiggle that flags a typo as you type, with green later added for grammar.

A reader spotted the catch: Chen cites Wikipedia as proof of who did the work, and Wikipedia's current source for that claim is a link straight back to Chen's article.