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Unfriggin believable I know. This affects all versions of Microsoft Money (Standard, Deluxe, Small Business)that use the passport for authentication. And that's right you can't even login to your file offline because they sent down a garbled local key. This will be big news by tomorrow if a fix is not found TONIGHT!

With all due respect, anyone who trusts ANYTHING of value to Microsoft should think twice.

Money did not have this feature several years ago. It was added later.

So, they get you to buy Money, or you use it 'cause it came bundled on your new computer. Now they gotcha. Then they add .net or Passport and rave about how much better you'll be with it. So you go for it. Now they really gotcha.

And now, they REALLY gotcha!

I'm sorry, but you're fools.

I've never used Money. Do you really need an online link to access personal files stored on your hard drive? Sounds like AOL. How utterly foolish. So if your phone line/cable/satellite goes out you can't access your personal files? Unbelievable!

This could turn out to be hilarious for everyone except Microsoft and the people whose files are now locked. From the tone of it, it sounds like everybody who in logged during the wrong time now has a new lock on their local files, and nobody knows what it is. Microsoft doesn't know, and the user doesn't know. And without it, no one can get in to change it.

So now the "Money team" has to figure out how to hack into their own program, and get past the niftiest lock they knew how to think up.

I don't know how long their encryption key is, but if it's 1024 bits or so, they could be looking at days to crack each one.

It's probably good that this happened. Microsoft was gonna put all this fancy Digital Rights Management stuff into Office, and that was gonna "protect your documents" and make them erase themselves after so many months, and make sure that "unauthorized people" can't read them. This is exactly the fright scenario they should be worried about... somebody makes one blunder in the wrong place, and it turns a company's entire pile of correspondence into locked-up gibberish that no one can get into.

Murphy's Law has not been repealed. It will always be there, waiting to bite us.