Welcome to Insanity

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.

This is a Corsi-Rosenthal box. It’s four AC filters taped to a box fan. You place the fan facing up, and it draws air in through the filters and out through the fan, cleaning the air as it goes through, and it’ll help improve the air quality in your home. You can get the materials on Amazon or at your local Home Depot or Canadian Tire.

This also helps for COVID! So you can use one of these if someone in your house is in COVID quarantine and the other residents are not.

Bemerkenswert an dieser Kachel ist, dass sie von BILD stammt.

Ohne BILD gäbe es die komplette DEBATTE nicht.

The Sea. The Crimea, 1908, Arkhip Kuindzhi

Medium: oil,canvas

Synthetic, cheap blue pigment with this kind of lustre and luminosity didn’t exist until the late 1800s.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night would not have been possible without it as he couldn’t afford the natural pigments.

This painting is amazing, not because of the subject matter, but because of the colour.

Aber dass Reichardt einen Fimmel für eine gewisse Produktlinie von Hugo Boss hat, seh doch nicht nur ich, oder?