OT: Acrobat Reader needs plugin?

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 21:24 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
> > I have some PDFs which Acrobat claims needs the "file open" plugin.
> > Does anyone know what this is, what it does, and why Acrobat Reader
> > wants me to get it?
> 
> Partial answer...
> 
> First, I tried opening it with the Gnome PDF viewer, and it asked
> me for a password, that the file was encrypted.
> 
> I downloaded the "plug in" and installed it per instructions.
> I then started tcpdump, and disconnected my DSL.
> Trying to open with Acrobat now resulted in a message indicating
> it was unable to contact the server.
> 
> Hmm.
> 
> Someone is trying to track opening of certain PDFs on my machine.
> 
> This was from the Numerical Recipes "old stuff" web site:
> http://www.nrbook.com/a/bookcpdf.php

The new NR site offers access to PDFs of the new edition of the book via
subscription, so that's probably what's going on.  The old stuff (and
some free new content) isn't by subscription, but I'll guess that they
are using the same technology for convenience.

Seems reasonable to suggest to them that the free, older versions not be
DRMed.

> 
> Mike
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs