Listening for the word
October 10th, 2012Since I turned on my Mac’s firewall a few months ago, I get occasional messages which cause me to wonder:
Now, I can understand why Word might want to make outgoing connections, to check for version updates, to print, etc. Anyone know why it would want to be listening on my network? It works just fine if you say no, but I am curious…
The other revealing thing, for me, was that I only saw this message today, which means I haven’t used Microsoft Word for more than four months. This time, as is usually the case, I only need to run it when I’m sent something by a lawyer.
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October 10th, 2012 at 8:47 pm
I smell a remnant of DDE. Remember that?
October 10th, 2012 at 9:01 pm
I think Dave has a point.
Does the lawyer’s document contain any images? Is it possible that Word is trying to fetch a logo from somewhere? I get this quite often with emails
October 10th, 2012 at 11:45 pm
No, I don’t think so, but even if it had, that would be an outgoing connection…
October 12th, 2012 at 6:43 am
It’s attempting to communicate with other machines on your network that are running Word to see if the same license key is being used more than once. If it finds one it will not run.
October 12th, 2012 at 7:46 am
Ah, interesting. Presumably, then, the firewall is a good piracy-enabling scheme!
Fortunately, one running copy of any Office app at a time is quite enough for me!