Thanks guys, all your responses are very helpful.
Obviously the worst thing about proprietary JavaScript is that it's
proprietary. You don't have the 4 freedoms.
Besides that JavaScript can be used for snooping various things, some listed
at https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Also, the JavaScript sandboxes on many applications are not too good
I posted my IMO on harmful effects of non-free JavaScript here:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/harmful-effects-non-free-javascript
tl;dr: tricking users, unnecessarily tracking of user actions on pages,
obfuscation or primitive digital restrictions management (hard to tell,
not sure what
I think of it this way, Facebook and I presume Google track users when
they're logged out and not even on their sites through all sorts of code that
we can't see or opt out of.
http://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-we-do-track-logged-out-users-but-trust-us/#!
Thanks for the great essay- I'm now convinced that I should keep LibreJS
enabled.
I read RMS' article about Javascript, Flash, and other non-free website code:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
In what ways are users vulnerable to proprietary Javascript? If there are
examples, could you please provide links?
A great amount of websites. From the top of my head, pretty much everything
Google.
I mean, in what ways can third parties control the non-free website software,
that a user may not agree with if fully informed?
For example: can non-free website software access and report on information
in users' web browsers? How about local home folders?
It's kind of an odd thing, because in the name of security, JavaScript tends
to be a somewhat castrated language, at least when it's loaded on the request
of a web page. You have all these settings in a browser for what it can and
cannot do, and JavaScript's ability is usually crippled by
I'm not really an expert on the matter, but from what I understand it is a
significant risk. The Wikipedia article on Cross-site scripting (XSS) might
be an interesting read.[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
10 matches
Mail list logo
