An accidental memory in the case of death

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

Folks want a quote from a Black or Indigenous person for their blog, but they don't wanna change their environments or GOD FORBID their consumer habits, even as the oceans rise to your door and the wildfires and logging bring down every old-growth forest.

(the history you cut out and paste into your cutesy little Revolutionary Scrapbook is still happening and still being made, btw. Your actions are part of it.)

anyway. I'm sitting here under a pungent yellow sky and aching for my people and the forests of Ontario. The Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins First Nation, for the colonizers) fled on boats while the trees next to their houses burned. Thunder Bay is full of displaced Indigenous peoples trying to breathe with air full of ash. Gayaashki-zaagiing Anishinaabeg (Gull Bay First Nation, again, for You Folks) peoples were ordered to evacuate in the middle of the night and were just told there are no accommodations for them, now that they've escaped. Thousands of people scrambling for protection and safety, while a bunch of white colonizers complain about the smell of smoke.

None of this is new. It's all a very old song.