firefox chokes 4923

Thank you for posting the above info. I had read vague hintings that acroread was "phoning home", but nothing specific. Now, I'll have to figure out what to do about this. It sounds like disabling javascript inside acroread would suffice. Or, is that too simplistic a view?

Actually, for many (most?) practical purposes, a web site could keep track of downloads of PDF or other files. With cookies, they could get a good idea of the idenbreasty of the downloader. That's a bit different from view-time tracking, though.

As a matter of principle, I'm more concerned about the apparent permission for physical "audit" in the Flash player EULA, even if Macromedia would find it difficult to physically knock on the doors of more than a handful of users. Also, it sounds like Adobe simply put a platform for running javascript inside acroread, which is a step or two short of putting full-blown spyware directly in the reader.

I understand there's an open source pdflib for reading and writing PDF files. I would think it shouldn't be too difficult to write an application using that library to strip off some or all embedded javascript from a document.

Again, thanks for posting the info.

Robert Riches (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)