Unexpected features in Acrobat 7
Unexpected features in Acrobat 7
Posted Mar 30, 2005 23:39 UTC (Wed) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)Parent article: Unexpected features in Acrobat 7
Ok, how is this different in principle from, say, web server logs?
/me feels a sudden urge to get rid of his Internet connection for fear that web site authors could realize he is viewing their content....
Posted Mar 30, 2005 23:47 UTC (Wed)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Mar 31, 2005 4:07 UTC (Thu)
by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)
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But they would track it if a web page link were emailed to a friend and he clicked it.
Sure, this behavior might be unexpected, but I don't see any reason to panic. There are much more interesting things to worry about. Plus, is it really wrong for a content author to know a bit about how far their content has spread? In nearly all cases, an IP address doesn't tell much about you.
Then, maybe I just don't understand some of the privacy advocates. The fact of our economy is such that unless you decide to be a hermit, some aggregate information is going to be collected about you. In reality, why does that matter? I don't feel like I have any reason to care that my credit card company knows I've recently ordered from Newegg and Reasons to Believe, and flown LanPeru. Are they going to hunt me down to do Bad Things to me? Worst case scenario, I might get more ads of some sort as a result, but they just might be targetted and are easy to ignore.
Now, when someone installs a videocamera in my house, there's reason to be concerned....
Posted Mar 31, 2005 4:35 UTC (Thu)
by ronaldcole (guest, #1462)
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Posted Mar 31, 2005 8:50 UTC (Thu)
by eru (subscriber, #2753)
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Try this skenario: Whistleblower at a Big Corrupt Corporation mails law
enforcement officials an internal PDF document exposing illegal activities
by the top management. Unfortunately the PDF was tracked and the Law Enforcer
just naively opens it with Acrobat, thus alerting the corrupt management
to the investigation, and giving them a head start with the paper shredders...
For a long time I thought of PDFs as just a kind of digital paper.
Too bad they have now endowed it with capabilities to perform
surprising activities when the document is merely read. We really need
an electronic docment format that is guaranteed to be "inert". I guess
plain ASCII is left, but something with richer formatting capabilities
would also be nice.
Posted Mar 31, 2005 14:52 UTC (Thu)
by cpm (guest, #3554)
[Link] (1 responses)
If I don't, or more to the point, don't care, then I don't. It shouldn't
A PDF *should* be an electronic document. Nothing more.
It can be copied, messed with, forged, and all that rot. To add all these
It's a PDF. Once it has been printed, it's as good as the paper it's
Oh, yes, many will say that using decent crypto/signature is too much
Posted Mar 31, 2005 17:28 UTC (Thu)
by juha (subscriber, #5866)
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Is it possible to create a filter program to remove these extra features from the .pdf file?
Posted Mar 31, 2005 9:13 UTC (Thu)
by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
[Link] (4 responses)
While there are undesirable possibilities to this, in probably 99.9999%
Rich.
Posted Mar 31, 2005 16:51 UTC (Thu)
by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
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Posted Mar 31, 2005 16:58 UTC (Thu)
by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
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_I_ know that, and _you_ know that, but the huge majority
Marketing people want to track this. They perceive (correctly)
Rich.
Posted Apr 3, 2005 23:00 UTC (Sun)
by error27 (subscriber, #8346)
[Link] (1 responses)
If there is a bug in your email or PDF that's a different story. Most email clients are good and don't allow spying. I use Yahoo, Gmail and pine and all three are secure.
My computer is my property and it should only serve me. It's like Adobe is run by some kind of hippies who don't believe in property. "We'll just waltz into the house that you paid for and raid the fridge and leave flowers strewn on the carpet."
Perhaps I sound like a Republican but people like this should be thrown in jail.
Posted Apr 12, 2005 15:35 UTC (Tue)
by gvy (guest, #11981)
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As our security officer has put it, "one specially crafted message was enough reason for me to drop Pine". He's using Mutt now, me too (for being programmable, but that's another matter).
Telling they're insecure doesn't make us more secure per se... even if it's not exactly technical security.
How about this: web server logs don't track when you read a file that somebody emailed to you?
Differences from server logs
Differences from server logs
How long until all these "I read your docs" acks displace bittorrent as the Internet Bandwidth Hog (tm)?Differences from server logs
Plus, is it really wrong for a content author to know a bit about how far their content has spread? In nearly all cases, an IP address doesn't tell much about you.
Sometimes you really don't want the author to know...
If I want the author to know, I can email, call, write, them andSometimes you really don't want the author to know...
tell them.
be a mandatory, or opt-out (why is this in contemporary parlance, is
it the spam issues and the spam laws? yes!) issue.
bells and whistles to it, to fend off these old-as-the-written-word
issues with "documents" (What is a document anyway?*) is to create
yet-still-another legal morass of so-called "Intellectual Property"
disputes.
printed on. Want to have some assurance that its "real" ? wrap it
in gpg/pgp before you send it.
bother, and they are right. But everything else is often simple
to break/ignore/circumvent etcetera.
> A PDF *should* be an electronic document. Nothing more. Sometimes you really don't want the author to know...
Actually, it's no different from Javascript page bugs, which areJavascript page bugs
routinely embedded in HTML files. Dozens of web analytics companies
(Web Trends, Urchin and Nedstat are the "big three") do this sort
of monitoring, precisely so that web page views can be tracked when
the HTML is sent by email or saved to disk.
of cases the stats are simply used for aggregate tracking for
building up marketing stats which few people in marketing even
read, let alone understand.
"Actually, it's no different from Javascript page bugs" Javascript page bugs
You are correct, that doesn't mean that they don't suck.
Html is bad for email:
http://www.avernus.com/~gadams/essays/20020418-html-mail....
Sure, HTML is bad for email.Javascript page bugs
of the unwashed LookOut-using users send each other top-posted
HTML-encoded web pages all the time.
that their statistics will contain a systematic bias if they
are not able to track when their web pages are emailed, read
offline, saved to disk, and so on. They are probably not clueful
enough to deduce useful information from the aggregate data,
but that doesn't mean there is some conspiracy going on here.
Say a website has a bug in it. That's fine. They already have that info but the web bug is an easier way to sort it. It's their computer so they can do what they want.Javascript page bugs
Pine's buggy, not secure. It could lead to even worse consequences.Javascript page bugs