161–170 of 173 posts
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Adobe Reader is already sandboxed a la Chrome.
According to Zerodium prices, VM escape costs as much as LPE, so it is unclear if there will be much of a security improvement beyond 2x. Although virtual machine hypervisors don’t automatically update, unlike Adobe or Windows.
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The Office formats are well specified, they are complex because that is the nature of the software but it is a world away from something like PSD or even PDF.
PDF is actually quite well specified, there are not many holes in the specification itself.[0] As to what Adobe Reader will do when it encounters an out-of-spec file, that is a lot fuzzier. On the other hand, the Office file formats (especially Word) have many un- or underspecified cases. [0] The only one I know of is finding the end of compressed inline image data.
Regarding Reader, I work with PDFs a lot, and the majority of issues have a fairly common pattern. The supplier has created a PDF in a 3rd party tool, which is invalid in a subtle way (production printers in particular are very specific about what they want to accept).
But it works fine in Adobe Reader, since it was built to be very tolerant in what it accepts, so it's often hard to convince the non-technical users that the file has an issue. It's great for end users but has meant that a lot of tools out there just didn't have to try too hard to make PDFs that mostly work, so programming workflows can be an issue.
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I don't know how accurate that is for PDF's, but webpages are supposed to look the same, and given known compatible styling, it should be on any modern browser. Browsers are extremely consistent in content presentation, that's why webpages from early 2000s still look the same.
> I don't know how accurate that is for PDF's, but webpages are supposed to look the same, One of Adobe's early talking points for the value of PDF's was that they would "look the same on all systems". Of course some context is necessary. PDF first appeared in 1993. In 1993, while the internet did exist, most individuals who were not associated with a university, research lab, or govt. agency, had no access to 'the i…
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I don't know how accurate that is for PDF's, but webpages are supposed to look the same, and given known compatible styling, it should be on any modern browser. Browsers are extremely consistent in content presentation, that's why webpages from early 2000s still look the same.
What? Lot's of webpages look different after simply resizing the window! The fact that this is on purpose, doesn't mean it doesn't happen (quite the opposite!).
Being able to run JS in a PDF sounds scary to a lot of people, but I wouldn't throw that idea out entirely. If you follow the work by Bret Victor & others on "explorable explanations"[0][1] and interactive scientific papers[2], you probably appreciate the need for a self-contained format for interactive documents. Could PDF be this? I don't know, I hear the spec is too scary. But I'd say we should have something like…
The same idea made the web the disaster it is today.
The same idea made the web. Commercialization of the web was what caused the disaster.
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I found quite a few areas that were vague when I was working with it. The advantage of the office formats is they are Zip files with a ton of XML, ie they are well defined. The application parts are another matter of course.
Just because something is XML doesn't mean it is "well-defined".
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PDF is actually quite well specified, there are not many holes in the specification itself.[0] As to what Adobe Reader will do when it encounters an out-of-spec file, that is a lot fuzzier. On the other hand, the Office file formats (especially Word) have many un- or underspecified cases. [0] The only one I know of is finding the end of compressed inline image data.
I found quite a few areas that were vague when I was working with it. The advantage of the office formats is they are Zip files with a ton of XML, ie they are well defined. The application parts are another matter of course.
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The same could be said for the Microsoft Office file formats. Or PSD, for that matter.
The Office formats are well specified, they are complex because that is the nature of the software but it is a world away from something like PSD or even PDF.
The fact that companies still have the email-> employee pc -> acrobat reader pipeline enabled says a lot about what companies really think about security, posturing aside. (home users too, but they can plead ignorance)
It's amazing browsers have so far decided to just not have an HTML archive format that could replace PDF. The majority of what PDF does can be better done in a webpage. Why not just an extension like .phd but is actually a .tar.gz that contains a webpages assets. Present like pdf's are, and done.
PDFs are supposed to look the same on every computer. Webpages can’t do that yet.