[Macworld]

Post your comments for Adobe Acrobat, Reader vulnerability affects Mac here

[jpellino]

Since Digital Editions has not worked since 7, and the web interface is just about the kludge-iest thing I've seen in a browser window, and the only useful thing you can do with Reader that you can't do in Safari is forms, I don't even have it installed. Can't imagine ever doing so again.

[adobephile]

Hey Moren, why didn't you mention this from the same Adobe article you linked to:
"In the meantime, Adobe is in contact with anti-virus vendors, including McAfee and Symantec, on this issue in order to ensure the security of our mutual customers. A security bulletin will be published on http://www.adobe.com/support/security as soon as product updates are available.
All documented security vulnerabilities and their solutions are distributed through the Adobe security notification service. You can sign up for the service at the following URL: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=szalert"
Or were you more interested in a slanted sarcastic slam against Adobe?

[AnubisIV]

Preview can handle filling in (at least some) forms. I've used the Tiger version of preview to fill in insurance related paperwork a few times now.
But yeah, I don't think I've had Reader installed since I upgraded to Tiger back when 10.4 first came out.

[jinx101]

I'm starting to think Adobe just isn't that great. They can't bring Flash to the iPhone, they can't patch a critical vulnerability for 3 weeks?! I mean, come on, even Microsoft usually gets critical patches out in a week.

Most vulnerabilities on all OS's come from third party software, that's no surprise. You'd think however that a major company like Adobe would have their stuff together to act sooner than later.

[deemery]

Hey Moren, why didn't you mention this from the same Adobe article you linked to:
"In the meantime, Adobe is in contact with anti-virus vendors, ...

Fair point, but most people I know don't run this anti-virus stuff on their Macs, because it hasn't been shown to be 'safe and effective'. If this represents a significant Mac vulnerability that the A-V products can handle, that's definitely a positive point towards "effective". I'm still not quite convinced about how 'safe' some of the A-V products are on a Mac, given my experience with them from my OS 9 days.

[johndrake]

adobephile said:

Hey Moren, why didn't you mention this from the same Adobe article you linked to:

"In the meantime, Adobe is in contact with anti-virus vendors, including McAfee and Symantec, on this issue in order to ensure the security of our mutual customers. A security bulletin will be published on http://www.adobe.com/support/security as soon as product updates are available.

All documented security vulnerabilities and their solutions are distributed through the Adobe security notification service. You can sign up for the service at the following URL: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=szalert"

Or were you more interested in a slanted sarcastic slam against Adobe?

The time frame is the concern not who or why or what, just when. Your Adobe site quote doesn't change that part of the article, and sarcasm is an appropriate response to the lack of concern shown by the snails pace they have indicated.

What are you some kind of Adobe FanBoy ;-)

[Dan Moren]

adobephile said:

Hey Moren, why didn't you mention this from the same Adobe article you linked to:

"In the meantime, Adobe is in contact with anti-virus vendors, including McAfee and Symantec, on this issue in order to ensure the security of our mutual customers. A security bulletin will be published on http://www.adobe.com/support/security as soon as product updates are available.

Well, that's great news for people who have already shelled out for McAfee or Symantec; but I'm guessing the number of Adobe Reader users who don't have those products aren't going to be wild about shelling out for a fix in the meantime.

[SunnySideUp]

I haven't had Reader installed in years. I own Acrobat Pro, but it's pretty worthless and buggy. I bought PDFpen as a MacZot.com special and it's done probably 99% of the things I need done in Acrobat. I hope they keep going and make it a full fledged replacement. Apple could do its part and keep improving Preview as well. if someone can come up with a Photoshop replacement I will be happy to go 100% Adobe free!

[doglesby]

And people wonder why Apple is cool to the idea of an Adobe virtual machine (aka, Flash) on the iPhone.

[n4hhe]

I don't want super-smart PDF files. I don't want embedded Java, Javascript, FLASH, or anything similar. I don't want a PDF file that can calculate taxes. All I want is what PDF originally promised to be, an accurate platform-agnostic electronic rendering of a document.
I remember when Byte was a leading computer publication. Jerry Pournelle used to reiterate his opinion that software copyright should be treated no differently than book copyright, that there was a lot of attempt to restrict fair use of software and that in his opinion we had ample precedent with books.
I like being able to search PDF documents. I like indexing and hyperlinks. But beyond that I want PDF documents to follow the paper model.

[Cog3125]

jinx101 said:

I'm starting to think Adobe just isn't that great. They can't bring Flash to the iPhone, they can't patch a critical vulnerability for 3 weeks?! I mean, come on, even Microsoft usually gets critical patches out in a week.

Well, yes, but to be fair, Microsoft has had so much more experience needing to do so. Practice does tend to bring down turnaround time. ;-)

[nwatts]

In the face of all this anti-Acrobat sentiment I'll say I love Acrobat Professional. I'd use it probably once a day, managing the huge number of PDFs I get from university. I haven't upgraded to the latest version with CS4 because I don't have any use for its fancy document sharing features. But if the next version is a bit quicker, maybe with more powerful OCR, I'd certainly go for it.
I hate it in Safari though. That complaint is totally justified.

[kimbarator]

Here's why I depend on Acrobat Pro:

My daily workhorse scanner is a ScanSnap, which I dearly love, but its software allows for no grayscale scanning option. So when I want decent grayscale files from scanned items containing photos or any graphics other than line art, I scan them in color, then convert them to grayscale in Acrobat.

Not only does PDFPenPro frequently choke on long documents, but I haven't found a way to get it or any other app to do this color-to-grayscale conversion., which results in very nice-looking (and much smaller) pdf files.

I'm no expert, so please tell me if there's another way to do this.