silkarth

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.

Texas Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), family Phrynosomatidae, Palo Duro Canyon State Parky, West TX, USA

Horned lizards are the group of lizards that can squirt blood from the corners of their eyes, btw.

They eat mainly ants.

Scent Bottle. British origin, date of manufacture unknown (likely Victorian era?). Made up of a faceted red glass body and a silver screw lid. Sized at h 44mm x dia 32mm.

And insanely tall people come in two categories: If they're merely tall, and not large, they're just skittish fragile giraffes. The most dangerous thing they can do to you is stand up too fast, faint because their blood pressure dropped, and hit you on the way down like a felled tree.

"I don't know, you're wearing a mask."

"How about now?"

"You're kinda mid, tbh" or "I don't have time for questions" are both valid responses