First of all, I urge you to make sure your copies of these products are up-to-date. Adobe has been releasing security updates to fix some exploits that are already being used by hackers. If you are using a Macintosh, there’s a good chance you don’t need or have Adobe Acrobat installed. That’s because Apple’s Preview comes with MacOS and does a fine job displaying PDF files.

If you don’t know why you need Acrobat reader instead of Preview, you should delete it from your Mac. Preview won’t handle some of the more esoteric features that can appear in PDF files, which is precisely why it is less likely to be hacked. If you do have Acrobat Reader installed on your Mac, this may be of interest to you.

One of the gee-whiz things Acrobat supports is embedded Java Script in PDF documents. Not only can it read the documents, it can execute them! That’s dangerous. That’s why security expert Steve Gibson (www.grc.com) has been recommending on the Security Now! podcast that users of Acrobat go into the preferences and turn off Java Script.

But what happens if you have Java Script turned off, and run into one of the rare PDF documents that actually uses that feature? Here’s what happened on the Windows version:

And sure enough, if you click Yes, it re-enables Java Script not just for that one document, but for all time, leaving the door wide open for the hackers.

This is very poor. Adobe is arrogantly assuming that they know better, and that you really should have that turned on from now on.