(satire) In another embarrassing gaffe, another Government department has admitted to accidentally unsolicited emails to unsuspecting football and soccer officials. The Attorney-General’s department put out a press release early this morning, revealing that they had sent all Australian citizen’s metadata to an organiser of the Asian Cup tournament. In the release, they blamed Microsoft for inadequacies in their Exchange Server and Outlook 2003 software for the fault.
A spokesperson for the Attorney-General’s department said:
“We just upgraded our systems from Windows 3.0 to Windows XP — and we didn’t realise that emails had autocomplete for electronic mailing address filling. We have notified Microsoft of the breach to prevent any other user terminals from facing the same computer fault.”
We have reached out to Microsoft this morning, who said:
“We no longer support Windows 3.0, XP or Microsoft Outlook 2003. We are in 2015 and our current Windows and Microsoft Office product line is Windows 8.0 and Office 2013.”
To resolve this issue, the Attorney-General’s department has pledge to use fax and telegrams to communicate for the meanwhile:
“Given the existence of unsafe features like autocomplete in Microsoft Office, we will revert to using Windows 3.0. For metadata transmissions, we will use fax and telegrams instead.”
This revelation comes after Parliament passed Australia’s first Mandatory Data Retention scheme forcing telecommunications providers to store its customer’s meta data for 2 years.