Daily Archives: April 4, 2005

Return of the Mac

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Paul Graham is one of the best essayists about technology writing today. He’s just published an interesting essay on a phenomenon I’ve also noticed.

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I’ve noticed this too. At the FOO camp in Holland last year, for example, the only laptops that weren’t PowerBooks were Sony Vaio machines running Linux. Paul Graham argues that this migration to the PowerBook and OS X is significant because geeks tend to have an influence on the evolution of computing out of all proportion to their numbers. What they run today, the business community may find itself running ten years on.

Adobe Acrobat now enables spying on readers

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Like many non-Microsoft users, I rely on Adobe pdf as a way of circulating and publishing documents. But now it transpires that

The well known PDF reader Adobe Reader reports back to a central server whenever you open specially marked PDF documents.

The newly released Adobe Reader 7 again allows authors of PDF documents to embed an arbitrary web address which is then informed whenever you open the document.

According to one of the Slashdot postings, the current Remote Approach tracking code already sends off the full file path to the PDF on your computer, which could in itself include confidential information. This use of “web-bugs” is the same functionality used by spammers to track and verify use of your email address and is done without informing the user and without his or her consent.

It’s all done with Javascript. According to the link, you can disable the spying ‘feature’ either by deleting all plugins or by renaming the plugin directory acroread7/Reader/intellinux/plug_ins. (But you have to remember to repeat this every time there is an update.)

Alternatively you can use one of the free PDF viewers (xpdf, kpdf, evince etc.), none of which allows this surreptitious functionality of reporting back.

[Thanks for Seb for the link.]