Re^2: Has a line been crossed by this user

[mrborisguy]

But that will only protect you from being harmed by Javascript code here on Perlmonks;

And that's all we're asking for. I watch what websites I go to, and it's generally a select few where I don't have to worry about anything happening, and those are generally well known and well traversed sites. Perlmonks is a well known and established site; it should be the same way, in my opinion.

    -Bryan

[jonadab]

You might occasionally be surprised what well-known and well-traversed sites will do. A few years ago (circa late 2000 or early 2001) I ran into a situation where the website for the Cartoon Network was using Javascript to change browser preferences (in particular, the home page) and to prevent the user from leaving the site, the net effect being that even after a reboot, the only way to visit any other website was to disable Javascript. The computer where I ran into this was still using IE5 at the time, and users kept going to that site, and then I'd get called down to fix it again, so what I ended up doing was using a hosts file entry to redirect that site to 10.0.13.13 or somesuch. Of course, a modern web browser won't allow such schenanighans, and the site in question stopped doing it a few weeks later anyway, but my point is that it's not safe to assume all well-known and well-traversed sites are also well-written and innocuous.

Then there's the small matter of what the advertisers who buy ad space on well-known and well-traversed sites will do. If you trust doubleclick.net to run arbitrary scripts on your system, you're insane, IMO.

[mrborisguy]

I had never really thought about it I guess. Thanks! ++

    -Bryan