I must apologize profusely for my incorrect "good news". I
really thought I had Javascript blocked in Dropbox. But, in view
of Ed's remarks, I just tried it again; and, as Ed claims, it
does not work when blocking the Javascript from the Dropbox site.
Sorry about that.
However, unless someone can enlighten me to the contrary, what I
would still claim to be true is that you can block the nonfree
Javascript code on the Dropbox site without losing the download
capability. I will explain in the following paragraph.
The Javascript for the Dropbox site is already open in the sense
that the source code may be examined. Indeed, I have looked over
all of it myself. There are five files. One of them, ga.js, is
for google-analytics, and it is downloaded from
google-analytics.com. Though it could still be argued that ga.js
is open, its license is most definitely not free. (See
http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html ) Nevertheless, I
can still block google-analytics without losing the function of
the Dropbox site for the purpose of downloading. (In fact, I do
block google-analytics everywhere.) The remaining four files are
downloaded from Dropbox.com. One of them, zxcvb.js, is in a
minified form that is hard to read. zxcvb.js is a password
strength assessment program developed by the Dropbox folks and
made freely available to the world. (See
https://tech.dropbox.com/?p=165 ) In addition to readable
source, it's Iicense is presented on github:
https://github.com/lowe/zxcvbn That license is extremely
permissive - the only requirement being that "The above copyright
notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies
or substantial portions of the Software." The remaining three
files are small and readable. Two of them, password_strength.js
and logger.js, have no copyright notice or associated license at
all. The one that does have an associated license,
dropbox-mini.js, is released under the GPL. Isn't all this free
enough?
Note that the NoScript add-on for Firefox, which I use to block
google-analytics (and lots of other stuff), is itself open source
and free under the GPL.
I think Paul Eggert's command-line curl.exe approach is a good
way to use the Dropbox repository if all Javascript must be
avoided.
Regards,
David V.
----- Original Message -----
From: "E. Caudex" <cau...@sysmatrix.net>
To: <help-emacs-windows@gnu.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 2:46 PM
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] Windows Binaries
Die Thu Oct 04 2012 03:09:06 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)
Richard
Stallman <r...@gnu.org> scripsit:
In Firefox I have all Javascript for the Dropbox site
blocked by
the NoScript AddOn for Firefox. I successfully downloaded
the
emacs-trunk-r110346-w32-i386.zip file from there. I think
that
this does mean that the page can be accessed and used
without
executing any Javascript code at all, free or not.
That is good news.
I am running the same browser (ver 15) under w64 with NoScript
and I
can't get to the binaries without allowing dropbox.com. I see:
The Dropbox website requires JavaScript.
What are you doing to get around JavaScript?
Ed
