This is great and all of that, but I rarely see on Lifehacker any mention of the huge security hole that this implies.

You're giving your data to a third party. Are they keeping a copy? Are they indexing it? Are they selling your data to others? Is it private? Only a fool would use this service (or similar services, e.g. Google Docs) for anything important.

bswilson

so, instead of just being able to click and load, i have to wrangle a url, go to another site, paste it and view then? no thanks.

holymogwai

Looks like a knockoff of Vuzit. Vuzit was first spotted on Digg 20 days ago, while it looks like PDFMeNot came out about 5 days ago.

Ryan Duff

This is really great :) I don't like how the Adobe Reader browser plugin works, it loads incredibly slow and tends to lock up things.

Joshiii-Kun

@bswilson: I thought the primary aim of this tool was to view PDFs that are already public on the web.

I noticed you can also send them a file from your computer to view and that can be problematic depending on the document.

One scenario I can think of is a man-in-the-middle attack where the page presented by PDFMeNot is altered. For instance, instructions to send money to pay for some service could be altered to divert the money elsewhere. Or the phone number of a financial institution could be altered to another phone number and then the person at the other end could suck sensitive information out of the caller.

But then again, if you just download a PDF file from a bank, unless your are downloading through an https connexion (it is rare that PDFs are put behind such protection), you are also open to MitM attacks. (Even with https a MitM attack is possible, just harder.)

So I'm not seeing this as more dangerous than reading any PDF downloaded from the web. Is there a precise scenario I'm not considering?

lemur

I used to use DocuFarm for this before they shut down in October of last year. With the firefox extension installed it worked exactly like Acrobat but 10 times as fast as well as doing word, powerpoint, and excel documents. I was sad to see them go. Fortunately the start up time of Acrobat on Ubuntu is acceptable and on Windows I just open up in Foxit Reader.

fizzyh2o

Seems like the effort it takes to mess with another party isn't worth the trouble. A solution looking for a problem.

AceKicker

The only advantage I can see with this service is when you try to open a pdf file on a public computer that for some reason does not have a PDF reader installed and since you are not the admin, you cannot install it. Other than that, there is no other use for this service.

Yes, it is a huge security hole if you use this service to view confidential PDF files.

If your concern with installing Adobe Acrobat Reader is because of its bloat, try FoxIT. I have been using it for the last year or so and it is great. The only reason I use Acrobat Reader is on a few occasions, I cannot open a PDF files with fillable forms. FoxIT can open most forms, but there are times when it cannot. This is because the forms were created with Adobe Acrobat and FoxIT is not 100% compatible.

moboking

I use the PDF Download firefox extension. Works great and gives me the option of opening in adobe, viewing it in my browser as html or downloading it.

Woodsyx

Ok, I think another use for this service is the embedded feature. This is great for people who run websites that have PDFs. Instead of forcing the visitors to open the pdfs with locally installed readers which they may not have, the webmaster would offer an embedded page for this file. I have a blog. I will see if I can include this feature in it. I have a lot of pdfs that I want to post on my blog, but I do not want to convert them to HTML. If this embedded reader works, it would be a great help.

Again as stated, this is a huge security risk if the pdfs in question have confidential info because you essentially give this company the pdf files.

moboking

It's nice I suppose but I just don't understand all the suggestions for how to view/download pdf files. I have never had issues with viewing a pdf file online. If I need it for later, I download it. If I only need to look at it momentarily (I.e to get contact information or read a quick article) I simply open it in the browser. I just haven't ever had a problem with this.

Having said that, I dont' see the need for an extra layer of effort to view a file in this fashion.

Thanks for the tip though. Maybe someday I will have a need and a quick search of LifeHacker will come to my rescue.

EracMan

Also check out their tools (bookmarklet especially). They also make it very easy to link PDFs to Pdfmenot.

[www.pdfmenot.com]

w3stfa11

Like many posters I don't think this will revolutionize my PDF viewing. There are only two cases relevant to me that I can think of where I might want to use this.

One is if I positively absolutely must view a PDF on my Treo while I'm on the road and don't have a laptop. I don't usually need to view PDFs on my phone so I don't have a reader for that. (When I checked for readers a long time ago, I did not find anything I liked.) So in this unlikely scenario, PDFMeNot could help.

The other scenario I can think of is when I'm installing an OS on a machine and at some stage of the game I need to open a PDF but no PDF reader is available. Very unlikely to happen in Ubuntu because by the time you have everything to run Firefox or any other web browser you are likely to have at least a rudimentary PDF viewer. But that kind of situation happened to me on fresh installs of XP. Again, fairly rare but PDFMeNot could be handy in this case if I'm not interested in downloading and installing Acrobat Reader because it is an experimental OS installation or whatever.

lemur

@EracMan: Are you using Safari? I just recently switched from Safari to Firefox, and my one beef is PDFs. Safari opens them in-browser instantly, while Firefox has to download it and open it in Preview. 20x faster than Acrobat, but 3x slower than Safari, and an extra click or two.

zimzombie

@ZIMZOMBIE: "Safari opens them in-browser instantly"

That's the way it should be - simple, direct, contained.

Anyone know of a FF extension that does this?

jawnz