The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the PDF as a standard format for electronic documents. ISO has christened version 1.7 of PDF, the current working version, ISO 32000-1.
"As an ISO standard, we can ensure that this useful and widely popular format is easily available to all interested stakeholders," said ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden in a statement. "The standard will benefit both software developers and users by encouraging the propagation and dissemination of a common technology that cuts across systems and is designed for long-term survival."

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With Adobe relinquishing control of PDF, the ISO Document Management Applications Technical Committee will review any changes made to the format. The openly published standard provides the technical information required for writing software programs that can create and read PDF files, ensuring that organizations will always have some tools available to render PDFs, even if Adobe stops shipping its PDF viewer.

Awesome.

Adobe is submitting its DNG 'universal RAW' format to the International Standard's Organization (ISO), in a move aimed at increasing acceptance and usage. The format is being proposed as part of ISO's TIFF/EP (electronic photography), standard. We spoke to Adobe about the move.

Great, having all my photography locked in proprietary data formats is horrible.

Nobody is buying it. Well. Employees, maybe. Microsoft is once again promising interoperability and adherence to standards, but its own version of each. Interoperability that is safe only for noncommercial software excludes Microsoft's number one competitor, Linux. It is noncommercial and commercial, depending on who is using it. So, right there it tells you that this is a promise to do nothing that matters. Microsoft is currently being investigated by the EU Commission regarding the same two issues, interoperability and its behavior pushing MSOOXML as a "standard". This is a promise to remain incompatible with the GPL, as far as I can make out.

Here's the response from the EU Commission. They totally get that this promise is insufficient. They've heard it before, at least four times. And it doesn't wipe the slate clean regarding past violations, even if they meant it. ECIS's Thomas Vinje also issued a statement [PDF] pointing out that the proof is in the pudding, that Microsoft doesn't get to define interoperability unilaterally, and as for standards, if it meant it, it would support ODF. What the world needs, he says, is "a permanent change in Microsoft's behavior, not just another announcement." ECIS' members include Adobe, Corel, IBM, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and SunMicrosystems. Here's Red Hat's statement. Here's Andy Updegrove's take. Todd Bishop's coverage on Seattle PI. And here's the video and transcript of Microsoft's conference call, with Steve Ballmer, Brad Smith, Bob Muglia, and Ray Ozzie. Look at Ozzie's expression in the photo on this page.

Q.: Follow-on: Given that you can't give a good reason why Adobe is using a server whose name is so suspicious, are you going to change the name?
A.: Absolutely. We are working with Omniture on this right now, and will make this change as soon as we can. (I don't know how long this will take, but will post here when I do.)

Hey, looks like he finally got it.

When you launch a CS3 application the application pings out to what looks like an IP address - and internal IP address: 192.168.112.2O7.

That makes sense, right? Adobe wants to be sure you aren't running multiple copies of their programs…. Wait something is wrong here.

The first clue something is fishy is that I don't use a 192.168.xxx.xxx numbering scheme in my network. Secondly, if you look at the address Little Snitch is displaying, the last "numbers" of the IP address (2O7) look funny. Also, IP address don't end in any .com/net/org suffix.

Turns out that 192.168.112.2O7.net is owned by Omniture, a huge behavioral analytics firm. Hmmmmmm, anybody curious why Adobe is doing this? Anybody care to sniff packets? I sense an invasion of privacy here!

The issue, as completely missed by John Nack the first time around, isn't that the software calls home, it is that a hostname that looks most like an IP address that belongs to a range that has been designated as private. Later, John Nack claims to have "miss[ed] a key point. No, John, you've missed the point and it seems you still don't get it. No one is complaining about the 2O7.net portion of the hostname, but the fact that it starts out with 192.168.112.2O7, which looks deceptively like an IP address in a range that has been designated by private. You can't honestly say that this name was picked at random.

192.168.110.2O7.net, 192.168.111.2O7.net, 192.168.113.2O7.net and 192.168.114.2O7.net don't appear to be valid hostnames at this time.