OT: Acrobat Reader needs plugin?

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 22:25 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 20:13 -0500, 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?
> > 
> > 
> > Coincidentally, the Numerical Recipes Web page I referred to in another
> > current thread requires that very plug-in.
> > 
> > http://www.nr.com/plugin/plugin_install.html
> 
> Not a coincidence :-)
> 
> And, tcpdump showed attempts to look up the website being done.
> They failed. I had inadvertently ;-> pulled the DSL out of the
> modem before trying to open the file. Using other than Acrobat
> resulted in "this file is encrypted, please enter the password".
> Also, a hidden directory ~/.fileopen with NumericalRecipes got
> installed, along with another binary file. Apparently, someone
> is trying to track opens to those files.
----
You're not being paranoid...they really are out to get you.

I thought that it fairly well explained the methodology and purpose of
the file open plugin on Matthews link. I hadn't ever heard of the plugin
before and didn't realize that it was something beyond the mozilla
plugin.

Craig