SELinux

[Alan Cox]

> >  Personally, I'd recommend not using acrobat reader. PDFs are more
> >  like executable programs than documents. So besides having to worry
> >  about bugs in acrobat reader (of which there have been plenty with
> >  security implications), you have to worry about valid PDFs doing
> >  things to your system or with your pre-existing data that you don't
> >  want.
> 
> Well the thing is that i wanted to read a manual in pdf format . You see
> there are a lot of them hanging around . So what do i do ? Convert the
> pdf to a more safe format ( by the way since u mention it , which is a
> safer format ? ) or just use another program to open the pdf file?

Use an open source PDF reader, most of which always run with the document
untrusted in safe mode and don't implement some of the more fun stuff in
a PDF.

But yes its always useful to remember that many kinds of document can do
strange things to themselves if nothing else - contracts that change
wording according to the date for example yet are the same digitally
signed document.

Alan