Comment by ekjhgkejhgk
Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 8 hours ago
The core of the problem is that we've made this behavior of "run javascript that pulls more javascript and then run that too" the default. Stallman was right, as always.
Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 8 hours ago
The core of the problem is that we've made this behavior of "run javascript that pulls more javascript and then run that too" the default. Stallman was right, as always.
>The core of the problem is that we've made this behavior of "run javascript that pulls more javascript and then run that too" the default. Stallman was right, as always.
It really isn't, because there's plenty of fingerprinting scripts that run on the same domain, especially fingerprinters from security providers like cloudflare or akamai.
Oh yeah. He's been telling us for decades how technology will be used to oppress people. I guess he had the experience of how things turned out with UNIX, and knew first hand how hard he had to work to even have a chance at undermining them. What he did at a time was build something from scratch which was compatible with the UNIX interface. These days I would call that a lost battle.
Imagine if you said: I'm going to undermine facebook by building another social network which will be Free software, and will be compatible with facebook. I'll federate facebook whether they like it or not, and I'll do that by reverse engineering how facebook servers talk to each other. That wouldn't work because it takes you huge effort to pull off, and it takes facebook zero effort to change the interface in a tiny way that breaks everythign for you. (Ok the analogy isn't perfect, but hopefully you get the idea of diminishing something's value by forcefully opening it up)
But he hugely contributed to win a battle like this in the late 80s, then Linus Torvalds came in and finished the job in 1991 or so. RMS doesn't get the credit or even appreciation he deserves. I think he's one of the most tragic figures in the history of computers.
A browser basically is like a really dumb trojan, pulling a whole herd of wooden horses into the city.
> Does he have a strong stance of JS in the browser?
Lets see what he says on the subject.
Did you actually read the article? It doesn't mention GPL even once.
And neither does the page on LibreJS, which is the tool he created to attempt to address the problem[1]
I would re-frame "is it really worth breaking half the web" as those sites are not compliant to begin with. Nothing in the web standards stack mandates javascript, its an optional feature! Web developers of yore understood that a fundamental property of a properly written web site was to degrade gracefully if javascript wasn't available, but the groupthink of the past decade has chosen weaponized incompetence over doing their jobs and in the process has not only thrown a load of noncompliant insecure garbage out there, but broken a load of accessibility standards, and other things in the process.
Blocking most JavaScript is fine, it mostly just breaks the silly pointless over-designed sites anyway. Just like everything else, most of the internet is garbage; blocking over-designed JavaScript sites isn’t a perfect filter but it is an ok first heuristic.
His stance is pretty simple. The JS on most pages is proprietary, and he doesn't like proprietary software.
The problem is not JS, the problem is useless techonolgies like WebRTC or WebGL that can run without permission and that, I think, are used in 99% cases for figerprinting. And people who designed them and did nothing to prevent fingerprinting.