Adobe Acrobat now enables spying on readers

Posted on by

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.]

The Grokster case

Posted on by

My Observer column on the case now before the US Supreme Court is out.

In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday, seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially knowledgeable about technology.

Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.

This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me…

Read on.

The truth about Gerry Adams & Co

Posted on by

Terrific piece by Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Financial Times pointing out that the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ was based on suspension of disbelief by the British, Irish and US administrations. They chose to believe that there was a Chinese wall between the terrorists of the IRA and the leaders of Sinn Fein, whereas in fact no such division ever existed. (‘Naive Idiot’ was the code phrase for Blair found in secret Sinn Fein documents during a security raid in 2002.)

The simple truth that is emerging, even in the US, is that the IRA, which is inextricably linked with Sinn Fein, has grown into one of the richest and most sophisticated criminal organisations in Europe, with tentacles extending to the US and Colombia. Its ultimate ambition is to take power in the Republic, and to this end it funds a huge army of Sinn Fein activists. It has planted sleepers in politics, the media, the law and business. It is using money obtained by criminal means to buy up legitimate businesses (it is now the biggest pub owner in Ireland) and it is replicating northern ghettoes in some southern inner cities.

Yet Blair, who is terrified of a bomb during his election campaign, and Ahern, who follows his lead, continue to talk to Adams and to bleat about inclusivity and the need to revitalise the peace process. If they refuse to face reality, there is a real danger that should Sinn Fein pretend to split from the IRA, they will go along with another disastrous fiction.

One of the few good things about the Bush regime is that it never fell for the proposition that Gerry Adams was a light-skinned Mandela.

Today…

Posted on by

… is the bicentenary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen.

How I wish my friend Elias, who wrote the definitive biography, had lived to see the day. He died in August 2002, a few days before my Sue, who was mad about him, as were my kids. Elias had been in the Danish Resistance during the war and had known both Leon Trotsky and Bertrand Russell. My children loved him because he was tall and elegant and courteous in an old-world way, and they recognised immediately that he was, in some way, genuinely distinguished. To this day, every time we pass his Cambridge College — Peterhouse — they sing out “Elias’s college!”

Copyright madness: latest absurdity

Posted on by

Clay Shirky, quoted in Boing Boing:

At Etech this year, I gave a talk entitled Ontology is Overrated. I want to put a transcript up online, and Mary Hodder, who recorded the talk, graciously agreed to give me a copy of the video.

When she came by NYC last week, she dropped off a DVD, which I then wanted to convert to AVI (the format used by my transcription service.) I installed ffmpeg and tried to convert the material, at which point I got an error message which read “To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed.” Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I’M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

Got that? I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN’T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders — they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity.

Overtaking Google?

Posted on by

Ben Hammersley has a piece in today’s Guardian arguing that Yahoo is catching up with Google. Hmmm… Much as I like Ben, his reasoning — though provocative — seems a bit thin. “Google’s reputation comes from three things”, he writes, “the quality of its search results, the cutting-edge research and prototypes it produces, and the interfaces it provides for other programs to tap into, known as their application program interface (API).” Ben glosses over the first while praising Yahoo’s new research team and its now-released API. I’ll take his word on the API, but the research effort seems pretty flimsy. And the search results still aren’t anything like as good. We all agree that Google needs competition to keep it sharp, but I honestly don’t see Yahoo as providing it yet.

Posted in Web

On this day…

Posted on by

… in 1855, Charlotte Bronte died in Haworth, Yorkshire.

… in 1755, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published.

Security blindness

Posted on by

Interesting editorial in MIT Technology review about the long term implications of siphoning off research funding to support a narrow security agenda. Excerpt:

American technology—just like its foreign policy, domestic politics, and popular culture—has been swept up into what Presi­dent George W. Bush calls “the global war on terror.” The U.S. R&D establishment has narrowed its interests in the years since September 11, 2001, concentrating its resources on technologies that provide security: weapons systems, defenses against biological weapons, biometrics, network security. The U.S. government’s research-and-development budget is now bluntly militaristic. In fiscal year 2005, federal R&D spending rose 4.8 percent to $132.2 billion, but 80 percent of that increase went to defense research. And most of that increase is committed to the development of new weaponry, like the ­ballistic-missile defense system. In all, the government will spend 57 percent of its R&D budget for 2005, or a record $75 billion, on defense-related projects. President Bush’s proposed 2006 budget, now being debated in Congress, would introduce cuts to many civilian programs but spend an additional $600 million on defense research.

The author (Jason Pontin) goes on to point out that organisations like the Natiional Science Foundation and the national Institutes of Health are being correspondingly starved of federal funding.

How to use the dial telephone

Posted on by

Lovely 1920s instructional film made by AT&T which Quentin found. It makes an interesting point which has a contemporary resonance, namely that technologies which once seemed strange can become so commonplace as to be invisible. It’s impossible to imagine a child growing up nowadays in Western society who did not instinctively know how to use a phone. But there was a time when a telco felt it needed to produce a movie to introduce customers to its new-fangled device.