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The US Government and Open Standards: a Tale of Personal Woe (thevarguy.com)
An anonymous reader writes: This article details a Linux user's struggles to submit a grant application when the process requires finicky, proprietary software. It also covers familiar ground made timely by the upcoming elections: the U.S. should prefer open source software and open standards over proprietary alternatives. The grant application required a PDF created by Adobe Acrobat — software Adobe no longer supports for Linux. Once the document was created, attempting to submit it while using Ubuntu fails silently. (On Windows 7, it worked immediately.) The reader argues, "By requiring Acrobat the government gives preference to a particular software vendor, assuring that thousands of people who otherwise would not choose to use Adobe software are forced to install it. Worse, endorsing a proprietary, narrowly supported technology for government data poses the risk that public information could become inaccessible if the vendor decides to stop supporting the software. Last but not least, there are privacy and fairness issues at stake. Acrobat is a totally closed-source program, which means we have to take Adobe's word for it that nothing sketchy is going on in its code. ... It would seem to be in the interest of the public for the government to prefer an open source solution, since it is much harder to hide nefarious features inside code that can be publicly inspected."
since it is much harder to hide nefarious features inside code that can be publicly inspected
Not THAT crap again.
Heartbleed should put that right to bed.
I don't understand your point here. It was found and then fixed in a few days, and the patches were widely released to anyone willing to update. The system worked exactly like it was supposed to: the fact that a single critical bug garned that much attention should give you an idea of how uncommon it is.
In contrast, Adobe Reader has had not one, not two, but 26 different cripplingly severe vulnerabilities in the last six months alone, and that's only because I got tired of counting after #26. How many people patch Adobe Reader? Would you like to compare Libreoffice to Microsoft Word, FreeBSD to Windows, or Internet Explorer to Firefox? Maybe Apache to IIS, or perhaps OpenJDK to Sun java? Amarok to Itunes? Our very own Adobe Reader to Okular or Evince?
Open source software does indeed have a demonstrably better security record than closed source software, that is undeniable. Further more, even if it didn't, it wouldn't matter because the statement was that it was easier to discover vulnerabilities in open wource software. And he's right. What do you rather do: read source code, or dissassemble a binary?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
When opened in Acrobat Reader it had a form with a button at the bottom to submit the information. He tried to process it using the most recent version of acrobat for each of the following operating systems:
The takeaway is this: a government process used a supposedly open format but ruined it by using a proprietary extension that only worked on a recent version of proprietary software running on a recent version of a proprietary operating system.
No, in this case I disagree. I'm not usually a fan of Hanlon's razor, but I think it applies here. I recently had an experience with the US Govt in this regard submitting an application to the NIH.
It was a second stage grant so a chunk of the proposal was how you did on the first stage. And they let you submit a video. So far so good!
What about the formats, well, not only did they allow wmv and mov, they also allowed the industry standard, open (if not unencumbered) and widely supported h.264 in an mp4 file.
Woah! That's amazing. Open standards are great, that should work anywhere, easy to make, etc etc nice happy flowers and bunnies and rainbows and unicorns yay!
Oh and the file has to be embedded in a PDF.
er, what? I mean, u wot m8? I mean WHAT THE EVER LIVING WHAT WHY WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN???
I am not kidding that was a requirement. So this comes with about a billion problems. First, "embedded" is ill defined: some versions of PDF support video playing in the PDF, but they can also hold files you can simply download. In the former case, Adobe (tm) decided to do it two different ways in two different versions. The first (older) way is to embed the video file and use the system's video player to play the video.
That's moderately sane. Was PITA before every platform supported MPEG4, but even back then I had a PDF which would play on Windows, OSX and FreeBSD (probably Linux too---sis not check). These days it should be easy---just use MP4.
Except it doesn't work that way any more. No, the newest version which not everyone has will only play stuff using flash. So, you have to find a flash player for the video and convert the video to flv and embed it that way. So far, so bad. Flash player is getting somewhat rare now, at least the standalone flash plugin not bundled with a browser (chrome?). And it ain't bundled with acroread.
Well that's all pretty obnoxious. Firstly the methods are mutually incompatible, of course. Naturally because one is for older acroread, one for newer. The file size is strict so you can't embed it both ways and hope for the best. Actually we couldn't get the flash version to work on anyone's (windows) machine. Well, fuck you very much Adobe.
So what I did was the third method which is to have it as an attached file. Double clicking on it invites you to save or open it.
Naturally of course NONE of these things work in anything other than acroread. None of the other PDF readers---the sort everyone seems to have now, like the firefox and chrome ones, the mobile ones or the one embedded in newer versions of windows---work with these methods.
And thankfully someone figured out how to do this in LaTeX. Scott Pakin of course---anything sufficiently obscure in LaTeX always ends up there. Anyone else noticed that?
So there it was, I had the nice, standard works anywhere video file embedded in a uh... PDF where you had to piss around to open it. It was still accessible to submit for anyone using open tools, but WTF?
Oh and of course I tried including a youtube link for when it didn't work and the PDF got bounced with a snippy message pointing out angrily that of COURSE links weren't allowed (heaven forfend!) because then someone might CHEAT by linking to a longer video than is allowed!
This is one of the cases where I think only incredible incopmetence and not malice describes the situation.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Except that the "open" PDF standard you're talking about is only a small subset of the oldest, most primitive image/text drawing features of said file format
That's not even remotely true. Read the PDF 1.7 specification (chapter 8, specifically) and you'll see all of that stuff documented. JavaScript has been part of the spec since PDF 1.3. The fact that some viewers don't implement features that have been part of the spec for over 10 years is not the fault of the spec.
You might be thinking of the PDF/A family of standards. These are ISO standards for long-term document archiving and specify an intentionally restricted subset of PDF features to ensure that it will always be easy to implement readers for them.
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