4 ms·

Everyone should stop writing webpages which require javascript. Javascript is a security nightmare responsible for the overhelming majority of web-based CVEs .

Everyone should stop writing webpages which require javascript. Javascript is a security nightmare responsible for the overhelming majority of web-based CVEs . Javscript's contributes mostly fluff to the vast majority of webpages. What's worse, some pages check for it and deliver a totally blank page if it's not enabled, just to punish the non-compliant. Even worse than all of the above is the fact that Javscript is the vehicle through which users are IDed and tracked. It's the reason why telling your browser to dump-cookie at the end of a session is ineffective. Javascript is popular because people who own websites demand it be enabled. They demand that so they can fingerprint you- no other REAL reason for Javascript's popularity. Every single person on this particular forum eithers knows or can clearly see what I am saying is true, but their jobs depend on them selling their Javascript skills and that's the reason this post, as you read it, is fading to gray as its downvoted. Javscript is the instrumentality of the surveillence state. That's 98% of its utility. All webpages should have a non-Javascript, "here's the info" version available and the fact they don't is a scandal and we are the culprits.

notRobot 7y ago
I have to agree with you. The vast majority of websites on the internet don't need JS for any functionality, and it's only used for ads, tracking, etc.
kube-system 7y ago
Tools don't exist for their own sake. They exist to solve problems. In the world before javascript, we still had interactive applications on the internet, we just built them with different tools, which were usually worse than the security model of javascript. If we got rid of javascript, we wouldn't get rid of interactive applications, we'd just build them a different way again. Also, you can definitely be fingerprinted without javascript. The web is a huge stack of technologies, and most of them can be fingerprinted, all the way down to at least layer 4. (...and layer 2 if you're not on a network you control)
zlsa 7y ago
JavaScript is not necessary on the majority of pages it's used on, but to say everybody should stop using it on the web is absurd. JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications possible; without it, they'd need to be native applications instead (which, while needing to be manually installed, almost always don't have the level of sandboxing that browsers normally provide.)
- david_w 7y ago
  "JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications .." ...I never use. Take all the JS on all the webpages and throw away every page to which it's not essential. Call the remainder set A. From set A, throw away every application whose functionality could be essentially be replaced by something like an ASP or JSP/Servlet round-trip hit without it much bothering anyone, as in the olden days. Call the remainder Set B. Take everything in set B and task yourself with creating a secure methodology of obtaining the same or similar level of utility not involving Javascript or anything less secure. Compare the effort to do that with the sum total cost of what Javascript has inflicted on the world. Include in your calculations direct financial losses, expenditures in counter-measures, all the manhours spent in ameliorating all the breaches in security caused by Javascript, all the human toll of being tracked - by Javascript- online... In fact, let's just keep this simple, forget all that. Every time any human being in any security agency in all nations the world over is engaged in any activity, offensive or defensive, which has as its ultimate root cause Javascript, just make that the bill you have to pay. Now look at the net gain (Google Docs!) and the net cost and tell me Javascript is a great idea. I got some time ago that not everyone shares my hierarchy of values and concerns. You use Twitter and Facebook and Google etc. etc ad naseum... all forks where each time I chose the other path. But by saying "no" to that steaming pile of shit I don't find I've said no to modernity and I don't find myself disavantaged in any way. Those things are not modernity or even the web- they're gadgets. Gadgets you love and can't imagine living without, that's all, like the smartphone you have, and I don't. J'accuse our world of the following. We have cost everyone incalcuable wealth, time, opportunity and frankly the attention of some of the best minds of the past two generations all to buy ourselves a very particular, circumscribed and unnecessary kind of interactivity on our computer screens. We have recklessly trodden very far down a dangerous and even deadly path, step by step, merely because at each point along the way we counted our own sunk efforts and extant artefacts as the measure of all things. This, and we have effectively coerced the world into following us.

notRobot 7y ago

I have to agree with you. The vast majority of websites on the internet don't need JS for any functionality, and it's only used for ads, tracking, etc.

kube-system 7y ago

Tools don't exist for their own sake. They exist to solve problems. In the world before javascript, we still had interactive applications on the internet, we just built them with different tools, which were usually worse than the security model of javascript. If we got rid of javascript, we wouldn't get rid of interactive applications, we'd just build them a different way again. Also, you can definitely be fingerprinted without javascript. The web is a huge stack of technologies, and most of them can be fingerprinted, all the way down to at least layer 4. (...and layer 2 if you're not on a network you control)

zlsa 7y ago

JavaScript is not necessary on the majority of pages it's used on, but to say everybody should stop using it on the web is absurd. JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications possible; without it, they'd need to be native applications instead (which, while needing to be manually installed, almost always don't have the level of sandboxing that browsers normally provide.)

david_w 7y ago
"JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications .." ...I never use. Take all the JS on all the webpages and throw away every page to which it's not essential. Call the remainder set A. From set A, throw away every application whose functionality could be essentially be replaced by something like an ASP or JSP/Servlet round-trip hit without it much bothering anyone, as in the olden days. Call the remainder Set B. Take everything in set B and task yourself with creating a secure methodology of obtaining the same or similar level of utility not involving Javascript or anything less secure. Compare the effort to do that with the sum total cost of what Javascript has inflicted on the world. Include in your calculations direct financial losses, expenditures in counter-measures, all the manhours spent in ameliorating all the breaches in security caused by Javascript, all the human toll of being tracked - by Javascript- online... In fact, let's just keep this simple, forget all that. Every time any human being in any security agency in all nations the world over is engaged in any activity, offensive or defensive, which has as its ultimate root cause Javascript, just make that the bill you have to pay. Now look at the net gain (Google Docs!) and the net cost and tell me Javascript is a great idea. I got some time ago that not everyone shares my hierarchy of values and concerns. You use Twitter and Facebook and Google etc. etc ad naseum... all forks where each time I chose the other path. But by saying "no" to that steaming pile of shit I don't find I've said no to modernity and I don't find myself disavantaged in any way. Those things are not modernity or even the web- they're gadgets. Gadgets you love and can't imagine living without, that's all, like the smartphone you have, and I don't. J'accuse our world of the following. We have cost everyone incalcuable wealth, time, opportunity and frankly the attention of some of the best minds of the past two generations all to buy ourselves a very particular, circumscribed and unnecessary kind of interactivity on our computer screens. We have recklessly trodden very far down a dangerous and even deadly path, step by step, merely because at each point along the way we counted our own sunk efforts and extant artefacts as the measure of all things. This, and we have effectively coerced the world into following us.