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Comment by Randor | Hacker News Reader

I would not recommend opening the linked PDF file. The link above to the PDF file is causing a BSoD on my fully patched Windows 10 sandbox. I've tested it three times, firing up WinDbg to see if I can locate the cause.

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Isn’t Windows not supposed to blue screen from user applications? Only kernel level stuff should crash it. Someone else mentioned that it could be graphics drivers?

Sure, assuming no bugs. Always a safe assumption :)

I thought they threw the GFX drivers out of the kernel quite some time ago, exactly for the reason that they were causing too many blue screens?

Poorly behaved graphics drivers maybe? It would be quite a surprise to see an intentional exploit used on a pdf with such a narrow appeal.

PDF works fine with chrome browser internal pdf viewer.

Win 10 v2004 and Chrome viewer works. Also saw first 2 pages listed on github before I hit download.

Crashed my Firefox on Android, too.

No problem on Firefox 82.0b1 on Windows 10 19041.508

Hmm, works fine on Linux with evince. Sounds like a pretty serious Windows kernel bug?

Or just maybe the poster has bad memory or other faulty hardware... oh but of course much more likely there’s a kernel more bug in Windows.

And the author knows about hacking hardware!

Cannot confirm this however, I am still on 1903 though.

Working fine for me on Win 10 and firefox.

What are you opening it in?

Do not know what GP is opening it in, but it appears to be causing issues for GitHub's renderer.

The last time I opened a pdf file in Chrome/Firefox in Github PDF renderer, the computer ran out of RAM. The pdf file I opened definitely didn't require so much RAM at all.

Alternative solution: download and open it locally

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