[conspire] NoScript

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Someone, not on the CABAL list, asked why I use No Script and didn't
> it limit my access to some fancy websites.  Below is my reply.  Did I
> get this reasonably correct?
> 
> 
> More and more websites use javascript.  Also many of those scripts
> link to other websites.  
> 
> Loading other websites means more web traffic.  It takes time to
> establish the links.  What is the benefit to me to load facebook or
> googlesyndication?  
> 
> 
> Javascripts take up CPU cycles on my computer.  Using my resources to
> serve up ads I am not interested in.  After I have bought something on
> line, why do I want to see ads for the same stuff?
> 
> Last, and most important, once a script is running on my computer,
> there are too many ways the bad actors can do things I don't want.

Sounds about right to me (alhough one could detail some of the many bad
actions by those bad actors to which you allude).  I'd even shorten it 
to:  'Because I want my Web browser to do what *I* ask, not what a bunch
of spooks and criminals want it to do.'


Javascript has turned out to be the keystone technology that drives
not just dynamic Web sites but just about all of the more-nefarious uses
of the Web (keystone in the sense that it's glue code making other 
pieces of badness able to communicate and function), something possible
because it is grossly overfeatured and by default has an appalling lack
of security and privacy safeguards.  The major browser manufacturers
have no incentive to fix that problem, in part because their priorities
are influenced by money they get from targeted advertising and other
shady industries that rely on data-mining and spying on users.  So, the
lazy assumption that 'If this were dangerous and ripe for abuse, the
browser coders would have done something about it' turns out to be
grossly mistaken.

A depressing number of people using the Web utterly fail to face the 
classic questions 'Who's the customer?  What's the product?  What pays
for the costs of these things?'  So, they resist the notion that major 
Web browser companies aren't strongly (or, frankly, at all) motivated to
look after their personal interests.  They somehow think they're the
customers, even though they never paid a nickel.

E.g., I kept hearing Linux and other computer users expressing outrage
and incomprehension that Mozilla, Inc. keeps cutting the funding behind
the Thunderbird mail program, and moving to EOL the project.  I ask
them:  What's Mozilla's revenue model for Thunderbird?  And, by
contrast, what's its revenue model for Firefox?  Often, they can't get
their minds around the contrast, or indeed what the issue is, at all.

tl;dr:  Gross intellectual laziness to the point of failure to grasp
self-interest remains a thing.