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A comment on From GPT-4 to GPT-5: Measuring Progress in Medical Language Understanding [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:From GPT-4 to GPT-5: Measuring Progress in Medical Langua... by 42lux on Thursday August 21, 2025 @07:43PM (#44979552)
It's hacker news. You can handle a PDF.
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Re:From GPT-4 to GPT-5: Measuring Progress in Medical Langua... by jeffbee on Thursday August 21, 2025 @07:49PM (#44979586)
I approve of this level of paranoia, but I would just like to know why PDFs are dangerous (reasonable) but HTML is not (inconsistent).
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Re:From GPT-4 to GPT-5: Measuring Progress in Medical Langua... by HeatrayEnjoyer on Thursday August 21, 2025 @08:04PM (#44979675)
PDFs can run almost anything and have an attack surface the size of Greece's coast.
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Re:From GPT-4 to GPT-5: Measuring Progress in Medical Langua... by zamadatix on Thursday August 21, 2025 @08:06PM (#44979693)
That's not very different than web browsers, but usually security concerned people just disable scripting functionality and such in their viewer (browser, pdf reader, rtf viewer, etc) instead of focusing on the file extension it comes in.

I think pdf.js even defaults to not running scripts in PDFs by default (would need to double check), if you want to view it in the browser's sandbox. Of course there's still always text rendering based security attacks and such but, again, there's nothing unique to that vs a webpage in a browser.

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