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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Tell me - is everyone else as nervous as I am clicking on a .pdf from a .ru domain?

I don't think many people use Adobe Reader these days, and I am not aware of any serious PDF exploits targeting other clients.

maybe not alot of the hacker news readers .. but alot of regular people do use Adobe Reader ...

Sorry, should have clarified that. I was replying to a question on HN about "everyone else", presumably "everyone else on HN."

I use Chrome to view PDFs, it isolates the process and doesn't support as many "extensions" as reader, so it is much safer. Works very well.

It's the ones you're not aware of that you need to worry about ;)

Apple PDF and Evince/Poppler are vulnerability-prone C/C++ codebases and have had bugs.

Chrome and Firefox builtin PDF readers are your best bet...

Firefox's PDF reader is written using JS.

Apparently not, I clicked it. After a long wait all I get is a corrupt PDF...uh, oh.

Rendered alright in the Chrome PDF viewer. It did have PRELIMINARY all over it, though.

No, but the Apple legal team has been informed about it so you're technically downloading illegal content.

how does what the apple legal team know change the legality of the download?

You're aware that the content is illegal as they have confirmed it - otherwise you might have had doubt

I am aware of no such thing. All I know is that some random person on a random forum claims that some lawyer at Apple claims it's illegal. And even if it was 100% illegal to view in the US, that doesn't say anything about the rest of the world.

The content may have been a civil breach of contract for the originator to disseminate, but you commit no breach nor crime by looking at it, as you have no non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

Quite a few of us probably DO have an active NDA with Apple (e.g. from being a Registered Apple Developer). Though IANAL ,from my reading of the terms viewing the materials shouldn't constitute a breach of the NDA either.

You're not Disclosing anything by downloading it, so I don't think the Non-Disclosure Agreement would apply.

Right. And unless the materials were specifically enumerated, even then, it'd be hard to argue that your NDA for software development would apply to "a service manual I obtained from someone who didn't have the right to distribute".

That might need to be qualified: depending on jurisdiction, just because if you don't have a contract with Apple, you shouldn't necessarily assume you're safe from civil liability (if you use or pass it on to others, at least). Here in England, in some circumstances it's possible to be held liable in Breach of Confidence for passing on information you come across that you know is confidential, even without any kind of pre-existing relationship like a NDA.

(N.B. I have no idea whether that's true anywhere else but England. Also IANAL, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

When it's posted on the front page of a news site, it's hardly confidential any more...

True. I was thinking of the submitter, though - it's not obvious to me that a court would consider a file uploaded to an anonymous file sharing site is part of the public domain (test: 'so generally accessible that it cannot be regarded as confidential') before it reached the front page of hn.

What exactly is "illegal content"?

downvotes? I assumed he was making a joke? I normally try to not comment about voting, but in this instance I'm actually curious whether he was making a joke or not.

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