[Gllug] Open Source Hardware User Group meeting on Thursday.

[Andrew Back]

On (01:20 28/04/10), general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> Dan Kolb wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 02:12:58PM +0100, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> >   
> >> Actually there isn't if you are browsing with Javascript disabled - does
> >> anyone browse with it enabled by default these days!?
> >>     
> >
> > About 99.9% of people on the internet?
> >
> > Dan
> >   
> 
> But I'll wager considerably less on this list no? I'm surprised if not,
> seeing as pretty much every security exploit out there leverages either
> Javascript, Japa applets or Flash. I'd assume those here are fairly well
> informed people who's skin would crawl at the thought of
> indiscriminately running any old 3rd party code your browser stumbles
> across.

"Stumbles"? What, like more or less any "rich web application"? That's an
awful lot of sites you're excluding there. You never use Google Maps, for
example? 

A purely personal opinion but, to me, this is akin to advocating only
executing assembled code because you never know what those compilers have
been up to. This is not a perfect analogy, of course, but the world moves
on and you are faced with choice between nostalgia/tech idealism and
practicality.

I long for the days when you could repair computers to component level (~
80286). But they're more or less gone, and I've come to accept that this is
a compromise that I must make if I don't want to find myself limited to the
world of nostalgic computing. The same holds true for the Web.

Ideals aside, shouting "No Javascript/Flash!" is a bit like advocating
Betamax when the world has moved on to using VHS (apologies for using yet
another terrible analogy).

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Back
mailto:andrew at osmosoft.com
http://carrierdetect.com
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