On Sun, 9 Jan 2011 05:49:57 -0800 (PST), Rich Shepard 
 <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Jan 2011, Daniel Hedlund wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure I'd worry too much if you keep your system up to date 
>> and are
>> using a reader such as evince or okular.
>
>    xpdf works well except for the newest adobe pdf version.
>
>> 2. You could use a command like 'pdftotext' or 'pdftohtml' to 
>> extract
>> the meat of the content.
>
>    This works only when the pdf has been generated from a text 
> creating
> application and not from a scanned document.
>
> Rich

 i tried a quick google to find the article i learned about this tool 
 from, because it actually gave a walkthrough of its use for precisely 
 the situation you describe. i couldn't find the article i remembered, 
 but the utility, pdf-tools, should provide you with all the capabilities 
 you need to investigate a pdf file for potential malware traits. the 
 didier stevens guy's website actually covers some techniques for 
 analyzation, and lists some common attributes to search for.

 http://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/

 a simpler way to know may just be the contents of the pdf, if you can 
 convert it into flat text file, you should be safe to comfortably browse 
 the contents to determine if the pdf is at all related to the topic of 
 the wiki. if it's not, it has no place there regardless of whether or 
 not it contains malware, and i would be pretty confident at that point 
 that it probably is.

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