1) Official Government sites (Internal Revenue Service, FINCEN, Beneficial Owner reports, FATCA, etc) in the USA and in Europe OFTEN use ADOBE GENERATED PDF's, which are supposedly enabled to be filled in by the long suffering citizen. This is because a government has the money to afford the full on Adobe subscription.
2) When the unsuspecting citizen downloads such a PDF using FIREFOX, and later tries to open it with either ADOBE Reader or with any of the "third party PDF" read & edit software, THEN the act of downloading and saving it with Firefox appears to have STRIPPED that PDF of whatever "secretive, non-transparent PERMISSIONS" that are apparently necessary to be allowed to open that PDF to read & edit it.
3) I have experimented with several common browsers, which I dislike for their data-gobbling spyware ( EDGE, Chrome, SAFARI) to see whether this also happens on those browsers. The results are varied.
Would it be possible for Mozilla/Firefox to find OUT EXACTLY WHAT IT IS that makes such PDFs downloaded via FIREFOX behave this way? That would be nice.
I would put my attention on simple data "bits and pieces" such as the DATE when a particular PDF was generated the first time (at the government office), and the DATE it was saved to disk the second time (at the home of the intended user. Resetting the date might work. Another item to look for is, maybe, a counter within the PDF file, which keeps track of how many times the file had been saved, and resetting that counter to ONE.
I would like to tell governments that they should not use such "greedware", but then again, have you or anyone
ever been able to successfully tell a "government bureaucrat" to do something better or smarter? Likely not.
Why? Because, as a rule of thumb, governments and software companies do not listen.
Mozilla is a software company. Would they ever listen, or, gaaaaasp, understand, or double-gaaaasp, respond in a reasonable fashion? I am still betting on Mozilla, but I am waiting for a response
Will the new EDIT PDF in the Firefox browser solve this problem? I will be back and report on this, when I find out.
