Security a Concern As HTML5 Advances 234
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Soulskill
from the new-armor-with-new-holes dept.
from the new-armor-with-new-holes dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "Every technology innovation has its coming out party, and Google Inc.'s recent 'dancing balls' logo experiment was widely interpreted as a high-impact debut for HTML5. But web security experts are warning that the sprawling new web standard may favor functionality over security, enabling a new generation of powerful web-based attacks. They agree that there are security enhancements in HTML5, but all expressed the same concern: that the new specification will greatly increase the 'attack surface' of HTML — providing more avenues by which malicious code can be delivered through the web. 'HTML5 has an enormous amount of functionality. The (specification) is just huge,' said Jeremiah Grossman of security firm WhiteHat. The breadth of the new specification gives him concern. 'I know that we're still finding vulnerabilities in HTML4,' Grossman said."
Those who complain about PDF w/scripts (Score:2, Insightful)
should also complain about a hyperText markup language document with scripts
Re:Those who complain about PDF w/scripts (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my favorite things about Flash is that it's easy to block and control. There's times when I want the functionality Flash is providing - but most times, I'd rather pretend that I don't have it installed. I was rather rudely reminded of this the other day when I installed Flash on my Android phone. I was all happy until I started browsing around. Until I get NoScript on my Android, Flash has been removed.
With this in mind, I'm wondering what level of control we might have over HTML5.
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Hopefully something akin to: image.animation_mode = once
-l
Re:Those who complain about PDF w/scripts (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not possible in the current spec. The browser has no idea that a canvas is even being used for animation, let alone when an animation has completed. Well, OK, a simple heuristic of "if this canvas is being repeatedly updated, it's an animation" is possible. But the problem is you still don't know when an animation has looped once.
The best thing that can be done is to refuse to update a canvas after it's been updated once.
So then people start removing and replacing the canvas element... Or use video instead... Or start using the audio APIs...
Really, a lot of the new APIs are really cool from a web developer "whiz-bang" point of view, but the HTML5 spec authors don't seem to give a damn about actually providing control to the user. Rather it's the whole "it's MY content, you MUST view it MY WAY!!! " stance yet again.
On the other hand, there's the thing where you can't full screen video in HTML5 because evil web page authors might some how trick people into typing their password into a video. Yet you can full screen Flash - they seem to have come up with a solution (the "press ESC to exit full screen" banner) so it's not like there's absolutely no way to protect users.
So who knows what the HTML5 developers are thinking, because the inability to full screen HTML5 video makes it a complete non-starter versus Flash video. Especially if you want to share HD video.
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If you can't do "once", I'd be happy with a flashblock by default of canvas, video, and audio tags.
-l
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Hopefully something like FlashBlock will be possible. It should be easy for canvas and video because if they're not part of the DOM, there's nothing to display.
Audio, sadly, appears to have a JavaScript object-only model, making it harder to create a FlashBlock like extension.
But, of course, you shouldn't need an extension!
You can block image loading in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome via preferences/options. But not video loading. Unless blocking images also blocks videos, which would make sense, but you can'
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You've never dealt with actual users, have you?
Go ahead. Explain to someone that in order to watch a video full screen they will need to either:
1. Context-click the video and choose the "Full Screen" option, assuming there is one. This only works when using the browser's built-in video controls, I think.
2. Click on the "expand" button to expand the video to take up the entire tab, and then use your browser's Full Screen feature, which is probably F11 except when it's something else. Or if you're using Safar
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Rather it's the whole "it's MY content, you MUST view it MY WAY!!! " stance yet again.
There is a cure for that attitude - for the same reason that Facebook pretty much wiped MySpace off the map, or the way Google turned Yahoo! into a has-been: Keep it clean and user-friendly, keep the ads un-intrusive, or face instant death in the face of superior (cleaner, less intrusive) products.
Re:Those who complain about PDF w/scripts (Score:5, Informative)
Er, why don't you just set plugins to only start when you tap them?
Re:Those who complain about PDF w/scripts (Score:4, Insightful)
o.O
Let's see...
Browser... settings... Enable plug-ins... on demand.
Well, I'll be.
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The browser can be set to only load flash on request. That makes it functionally similar to flashblock with firefox.
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One of my favorite things about Flash is that it's easy to block and control. There's times when I want the functionality Flash is providing - but most times, I'd rather pretend that I don't have it installed. I was rather rudely reminded of this the other day when I installed Flash on my Android phone. I was all happy until I started browsing around. Until I get NoScript on my Android, Flash has been removed.
In the Android browser settings, you can set it so that plug-ins will only show a placeholder until the plug-in is activated for a particular page. It basically gives you Flashblock functionaility, except activating one flash doc on a page will activate them all.
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You are spot on.
As I posted elsewhere here (but modded down into oblivion because fanboys will be fanboys), all I have to say is thanks Apple.
All because you wanted to be greedy. Fanboys kept saying it was because of "the superior experience," but it really was so that Apple got a cut from one buying 30 Rock from ITunes instead of being able to stream it from Hulu via flash.
So instead of being able to use Flashblock to block malware and only view video when we chose (and not having multiple video ads/misc b
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I don't know about the rest of you (Score:5, Insightful)
But I'm really sick of hearing about HTML5. Maybe it's because every other day I see/hear a high level exec coming around and going crazy with statements like "HTML5 IS THE FUTURE WE HAVE TO BE ON IT. RIGHT NOW." Then I have to spend an hour explaining why it's not even currently usable for any serious enterprise application, and how the spec is not yet solidified.
The entire disarray of this, and the mobile space, makes up upset.
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:5, Insightful)
Standards are important but without fancy technology buzzwords I don't think the IT department would ever get funding.
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Standards are important but without fancy technology buzzwords I don't think the IT department would ever get funding.
You're probably right. The downside is you end up hiring people based on their "qualifications" that consist of listing a buzzword on their resume. Or when some marketing guy gets it stuck in their head and thinks they know how to do your job. Or when your site becomes a mess because someone in management insists that you include all these buzzword "technologies" in order to be on the "cutting edge".
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh ya, you're quite right about that. My rant was on the topic of HTML5, not the article :)
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Four seconds for that page to respond (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because a spec isn't finalized doesn't mean some of the feature haven't been implemented. You can find what's been implemented [html5readiness.com] and just maybe, impress your boss.
The web page you linked is an example of what can go wrong with HTML5 in the wrong hands: it ends up just like Flash in the wrong hands has ended up for years. Not only does it use mystery meat navigation [webpagesthatsuck.com], but it also takes literally four seconds from when I move the pointer to when another wedge of the graph lights up. I'm using the latest release version of Firefox (3.6.10) on Windows XP.
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You don't know what you're talking about. There's no mystery-meat on that page. The only navigation are clearly labeled text links.
And just because your particular browser sucks at rendering the interactive graph doesn't make it a bad page. The whole point of the graphic is to illustrate browser support for HTML5 in a compelling way. And how better than to make that display actually use and encourage HTML5
FF is the weakest of the current browsers when it comes to javascript and canvas speeds. Safari and Chr
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Reference implementation (Score:2)
Implementing stuff before the spec is finalized. That just seems weird. :P :)
A proper spec isn't finalized until a reference implementation is ready. One of the reasons that some of the HTML 4.01 features never entered wide use is that absolutely nothing supported them correctly for years after HTML 4.01 became a W3C Recommendation. Take the <col> and <colgroup> elements for example; those still aren't consistent even in browsers that do support them.
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I understand the idea of a reference...
But it seems like the reference implemenntations end up being marketed and the full spec is finalized much after the reference has essentially been adopted. Hopefully, the reference was correct...
I may just have an idealistic view, though. :)
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No kidding. I am usually not allowed to implement in a technology is obsolete...er, "well supported."
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That is the slowest, clunkiest, most visually confusing, least responsive, and perhaps most overall depressing site I've been to this year. God, if I showed that to my boss arguing for html5 we'd get knocked clear back to plaintext. Maybe it's my browser, but Firefox 3.6 is a fair chunk of market share.
And as another person said, this is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Flash -- making fancy gizmos just because we can. This is why we programmers aren't let outside where the normal people play
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Really, it seems like one of the (very) few HTML5 things that work across browsers is the contenteditable attribute, which Internet Explorer has implemented since I believe version 6, and was widely condemned at the time by the "purists" as it wasn't part of the "official" HTML 4 spec.
Just like the innerHTML attribute, MS implemented something that wasn't in the spec, got slagged to hell for it, and then had it copied by all the other browsers playing catchup.
Your point was what again ?
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I can't really complain about an open technology gaining momentum. So if it's those pointed haired bosses pushing for it, who cares if they fully get it.
Is a spec for this sort of thing ever really complete? Parts of it often are, and the early adopters taking advantage of those parts are the only reason this stuff moves forward. In fact, by using the technology early, you are helping to determine which features are most important and which ones need to be rethought.
We need people taking advantage of HTM
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Then I have to spend an hour explaining why it's not even currently usable for any serious enterprise application, and how the spec is not yet solidified.
Yeah, and then you make the off-handed observation that you can do all of this stuff in Flash, and that this sort of thing (video + audio) is easy and is Flash's bread-and-butter, and, oh yeah, it's also worked for the past decade, and then you get modded down into oblivion because nobody wants to hear the bitter truth when there's fresh Flavor-Ade to be d
Dancing balls? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Google Inc.'s recent 'dancing balls' logo experiment "
If that's a sing of what's coming in HTML 5, I don't want it. That stupid thing dragged my machine to a crawl and I had to be sure I didn't have any google tabs open.
The last thing I want is for more &*^%*() CPU-hogging crap to be added to the friggin' web.
Re:Dancing balls? (Score:4, Funny)
Time to retire the C64 and cradle modem bro
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You might want to consider upgrading your machine... I had no issues when the danging balls were on the homepage and my machine is 3 years old. I quite liked it actually.
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I googled around that day and found lots of people complaining. Aparently for Chrome it wasn't a problem, but Firefox users were hosed.
You'd think they would test it for multiple browsers at Google, before pushing it to one of the most used pages of the web...
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You might want to consider upgrading your machine
Do you know of an affordable 10" laptop PC with noticeably better performance on such a webapp?
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Check your machine? My old laptop (1.7GHz Celeron M, 1.5GB RAM, WinXP, ca 2006) saw no issues. Wish I could say the same for my 10 year old Mac.
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Heck, my netbook didn't slow to a crawl. The animation was slow, but the rest of the machine was fine.
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Maybe not so much.
From the HTML 5 spec:
16.2.7.1 Dancning balls shall be supported.
16.2.7.1.1 Non-graphical browsers shall support curses like, text based dancing balls.
16.2.7.1.2 Any browser unable to display dancing balls shall be immediately redirected to MySpace.
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If that's a sing of what's coming in HTML 5, I don't want it. That stupid thing dragged my machine to a crawl and I had to be sure I didn't have any google tabs open.
HUH??? What are you running, IE3 in Windows 95 on a 386? It didn't slow my netbook (running windows 7 at the time with FireFox) down a bit, and I only paid $300 for the computer.
I think you either need a new computer, or get rid of a shitload of viruses.
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He has a point though, I personally love most of the new HTML5 features, but if every site starts piling on canvas animations, videos and audio it'll be annoying as hell.
I'd like to see this stuff become optional (on a browser basis and not site-by-site), perhaps don't start playing (or loading) a video/audio/canvas element until the user explicitly clicks play (with an option to pre-load but not autoplay for those with no bandwidth limits but who still don't want annoying unwanted video/sounds).
Unfortunate
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Re:Dancing balls? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The reason HTML5 is important is the open standard aspect of it. Flash is ubiquitous on the web, but we are all at the mercy of a company a
Most sites aren't in an SWF (Score:2)
.except when a Flash page behaves the same way. See Pandora for example: it's one big applet
Typically, only media players (such as Pandora) and corporate brochureware (such as Pop-Tarts.com) act that way. Other sites have accessibility concerns [wikipedia.org] that preclude putting the whole site in an SWF.
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html5 will actually make that perform better
That's the problem. We don't want that to perform better. We don't want it to perform at all. Not unless we tell it to, and only in very specific circumstances.
New strategies? (Score:3, Interesting)
web security experts are warning that the sprawling new web standard may favor functionality over security, enabling a new generation of powerful web-based attacks.
MS will Embrace and Extend, but not Extinguish the potential for security holes.
Apple will probably do much the same, but might do the enhanced functionality bit also.
The BSD and *nix variants will only take on the functionality, most foolishly (using MBA "forced-upgrade-income" definition).
I'm more worried about advertisements (Score:4, Interesting)
While I'm sure some of the new functionality will be exploited, I expect most of the abuse will be from folks who want to push ads and track users.
Re:I'm more worried about advertisements (Score:4, Interesting)
Not HTML5 (Score:5, Informative)
Google's "dancing balls" wasn't HTML5, it was divs, javascript and CSS border radius.
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So are the majority of the HTML5 "demos" being touted as the future of the web.
I was exploring some "HTML5 demos" the other day ... bunches of timed PNGs on layers, controlled by js. The only HTML5 tag in most of them was an <audio> tag, and amusingly enough they had fallback tags to the <object> we all know and love.
Presumably the world will be a much better place when we have separate audio and video tags as opposed to that outmoded, messy object tag that does EXACTLY THE SAME THING. Ah, pr
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If it's "Plain Old Text", why do I have to escape (and sometimes fail to escape) < > " & as HTML entities ?
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Sorry, showing my age now ...
When I said layers, I was meaning divs (you know, the thing that replaced layers when reflowing content became fashionable).
Not a canvas tag in sight.
Optimize for the common case (Score:3, Insightful)
When HTML spec is extended that obviously increases the attack surface since popular browsers will have to support it. But in time it may replace a number of other technologies (Flash comes to mind), that -combined- may have a larger attack surface. And since displaying HTML is the core function of a browser, implementations are likely to be pretty solid compared to some add-ons.
So you'd have to look forward, and compare [average setup now] with [average setup in XX years from now]. If that comparison turns out positive, HTML5 is a move in the right direction.
As opposed to what? (Score:5, Insightful)
How are the "concerns" over HTML5 any different than any other platform? Flash, ASP, javascript, etc have all had and continue to have vulnerabilities. The only way to stay 100% safe is to stay off the internet. Did anyone expect people who make their living by addressing both real and imagined security risks to not comment with an angle that puffed up their importance in the net ecosystem?
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How are the "concerns" over HTML5 any different than any other platform? Flash, ASP, javascript, etc have all had and continue to have vulnerabilities. The only way to stay 100% safe is to stay off the internet. Did anyone expect people who make their living by addressing both real and imagined security risks to not comment with an angle that puffed up their importance in the net ecosystem?
Actually this is a very very important point. You can't compare the potential security risk betwenn HTML5 and HTML4. You have to compare it with HTML4 plus all the plugins it can potentially replace (like, say, Flash).
My biggest concern, as others have pointed out, are using things like canvas elements over top of content to display ads and whatnot. But then, really, it will just be like the new features of any previous HTML/Javascript spec. There will be a lot of annoyances and some features used in re
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I think it would be a nice browser feature to disallow clicks or any other mouse/keyboard events on a canvas element to cause the browser to navigate.
Well the problem (Score:2)
Is that the more core to the spec it is, the less you can do to mitigate it. With Flash there's a simple solution: Block it. You can use a plugin like Flashblock that allows you to run it only as needed, you can set it to only run on some sites, or you can shut it off entirely. It is easy to restrict access to it when ti isn't needed and thus increase security.
When the features are in HTML itself... Well then what do you do?
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Well, you install a plugin that will be able to remove ads from the DOM. Problem solved.
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Good luck with that div block.
I seem to remember a while back some assholes suggesting that content and presentation should (sorry, they insisted MUST) be separated. While some of us fought it tooth and nail, the masses of buzzword obsessed PHBs won, with their demands that every page be W3C compliant, meaning web designers would strip 99% of the markup out to a separate CSS file to hide it where the validator wouldn't find it.
So now we have a generation of web designers (the last 5 years batches, I'd guess
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Maybe not? http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20016505-71.html [cnet.com]
dancing balls (Score:2)
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FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
The article points out no specific flaws. It just says that HTML is growing, therefore the chance of a hole (the "attack surface") also is growing.
Choose your poison. The same can be said about writing an app for an operating system. "Windows/Mac OS/Linux has an enormous amount of functionality. Therefore I'm concerned that there could be a lot of vulnerabilities."
Yes.
But the growth of the browser will not simply add to the overall size of the computer. Because of a big browser, you may have a smaller operating system. This is the idea behind Chrome OS.
It is not a perfectly equal replacement. If the browser grows 15 MB, that does not mean the operating system will shrink 15 MB. But one thing that is better about putting a feature in the browser is that more eyes are on it. There will be a lot more users who try to write a program in JavaScript than against even the Windows, even the iPhone, API. HTML 5 will bring about a lot more software developers and a lot more software development.
Fear, Fear, FEAR! (Score:3, Insightful)
said Jeremiah Grossman of security firm WhiteHat.
So you really need to buy their security solutions! NOW! Meanwhile, Goodyear tires said to really safe on the road (and to keep your CHILDREN! safe) you should get new tires every 5000 miles, and the Head & Shoulders folks claim washing your hair three times a day will avoid a stinky head. And the government said they taking blood and tissue samples at the airport will protect us from engineer^H^H^H^H^H^H terrorists ever more so.
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We should therefore not take it face value, but dismissing it entirely because it comes from a security firm is just as stupid. This is Slashdot, lets discuss this on technical merit of the arguments, not on some notion of politics.
The Modern Techie (Score:3, Insightful)
The Modern Techie will now by definition reject all new technology no matter what advancements are in it. While adopting any new technology will have tradeoffs the modern will hold on to whatever tradeoff negative effect and call it a horrible plan. Any new tech is now a threat to their way of life and no longer a new interesting field to study...
I think us techs have gotten too old.
Another member of the Tautology Club... (Score:2)
Shock! The attack surface is proportional to the amount of functionality offered! Ergo, we can build more secure applications by eliminating functionality!
I have a lot of respect for the security community, but sometimes they confuse the newsworthy with the merely obvious.
A huge risk in HTML5 (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me start out by reminding everyone that when Netscape came up with Cookies, everyone thought they were fine. Now, thanks to 1 pixel images and other tracking methods, cookies are the key to online companies aggregating bits of "anonymous" data into an identifiable profile of a person. Does Google know only as much about you as you would like? In fact, they know far more about you than you would expect, even if you don't use GMail.
The single biggest shot across the bow to privacy in HTML5 is the ping attribute [w3.org]. It may seem innocuous at first glance, but according to MozillaZine [mozillazine.org], it sends an HTTP POST request to each url. Why not GET instead?
This will allow Google, Alexa, FaceBook, or any "partner" to track users, if a site implements ping, easier than ever before. Some say trackers will migrate away from redirect URLs, but I say they will do both, if only to sop up every last piece of data they can.
I can see ping being used as a stealth DDOS attack, if enough malicious links can be distributed. Some content provider web API gets hacked, thousands of sites load up links (via AJAX) that ping slashdot.org, and Slashdot goes down. Will ping implementations be smart enough to reduce the list of URLs down to unique values? How many times does ping="slashdot.org slashdot.org/foo slashdot.org/comments.pl slashdot.org/article.pl" actually hit the poor, unsuspecting server? There's no apparent limit to how many URLs can be stuffed into a single ping, either.
I'm sure the black hats will think of other ways to exploit this. I agree that tools are neither evil nor good, but this is ripe for unintended consequences.
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It looks like that option was included with the intention the browsers implementing the feature would have a method to disable it's usage. I'm guessing if it gets crazy then major players will ship with it disabled, or maybe include some sort of same domain policy for pings (ping domain has to match referrer or href). I'm not too scared, and this would work much better than JS versions of the same thing.
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Why does it matter if its a GET or POST? I mean, why would you want GET? More chances that the URL will contain sensitive data that gets logged in more places. My webservers log GETs with all their encoded data by default, but the only thing I know about posts in the
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I also don't get the hangup with ping using POST. It's just a word that shows up in the HTTP dialog. According to HTTP spec, POST would make more sense for this, since you're essentially publishing tracking information to a site.
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The browser already has a location from the href, it doesn't care what the ping response(s) are, except for the headers (so that cookies can be updated), so HTTP HEAD would suffice.
How can HTML4 be vulnerable? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't even contain any code, being a markup language? It's not even Turing complete.
[italic attribute="question"]Is this invented markup language of mine also vulnerable?[/italic]
*shrug*
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Something doesn't have to be Turing Complete to be a danger. True, not being TC may reduce the options available to hackers, but does not eliminate them. Even some images and documents were able to exploit bugs by taking advantage of a hole in some graphics renderers (browsers) whereby certain pixel combinations triggered a bug that allowed the rest of the image's bytes to "flow" into memory, where the render engine starts executing them as if they were machine code. It's similar to a buffer-overflow exploi
Browsers should be strictly sandboxed! (Score:2, Interesting)
Browsers, IM tools, Skype, and other such tools should ALWAYS run under very restrictive permission levels. I don't need my browser writing anywhere on my computer except for maybe one folder (usually). I don't need it changing the registry. I don't need it to be able to unsandboxed execute code.
So keep it isolated using permissions. That is the the last line of defense against malicious sites.
That would solve a great number of problems.
My concern (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not an expert of any kind, but my general concern with the web has been growing as static documents have become applications. It's the same reason I don't like the idea of javascript in PDFs. I like the idea of a static document that doesn't do anything, but is merely viewable. Yes, yes, I know that it's possible for malformed documents to trigger exploits in the document viewer, but that seems like it should be more rare and easy to protect against.
At you upgrade HTML to make web applications more and more powerful, it seems likely to me (from a non-expert standpoint) that you're increasing the variety of security concerns we need to worry about. There's a part of me that wishes we had two different things: a web browser that allowed for safe passive viewing of relatively static content, and an application that supported an application framework similar to current web applications.
Ok, I'm ready for people to yell at me for being stupid now.
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I'm a security expert of some kind, but you are of course spot on. The more flexibility you have, the bigger the attack service. And things like a scripting language may add a lot of flexibility. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the risk. Having sites run in there own sandbox (including the scripts) for instance. Or having plugins run in their own process, so they don't have direct access to browser data.
The current set of web-browsers and web standards do make a pretty brittle system. I've always wond
That's why HTML should have been an API. (Score:2)
the new specification will greatly increase the 'attack surface' of HTML -- providing more avenues by which malicious code can be delivered through the web. 'HTML5 has an enormous amount of functionality. The (specification) is just huge
If HTML was an API, not only security would be handled much more easily, but the functionality could be enhanced and extended much faster...
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Pardon me, I meant flashblock
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Give me a break. You'd rather lash yourselves to Adobe rather than the open HTML5 standard?
Besides, there will be an adblock for HTML5 eventually. There's no structural limitations on it.
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No there won't. Flash was a singular fixed object. HTML5 is an entire markup.
Let me know how easy it is to block every and on each page. Let me know how that works out for ya
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The point that security researchers have been trying (for years) to get across to developers and companies alike is that ALL software/protocols/standards/whatever should be developed with security in mind from the beginning. Granted, even with secure coding practices and rigorous application security testing, there will always be some vulnerability that gets overlooked by the developer or discovered by an attacker. The thing is that most companies tend to put functionality and featur
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Is a web browser an application or a platform? (Score:2)
if an idiot developer wants to make an application in an insecure way, the platform can not stop them.
I find your statement ambiguous. Did you mean that in the sense of the web browser as an application and a device's operating system as a platform? Or did you mean it in the case of a web app as an application and the web browser as a platform? The article, as I understand it, is about the latter sense.
No platform is 100% secure (Score:2)
if the platform implements something insecurely, then relying on that implementation is not building a secure application... it doesn't mean that a secure application can not be built on that platform.
As far as I know, formal verification [wikipedia.org] of the security of a computer program as large as a platform is nowhere near prime time. This means you can't be sure that any platform implements every necessary feature 100% securely, and relying on any implementation is not building a secure application, unless perhaps your application requires so few platform features that it would work in HTML 1.0.
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Effectively there is a need for web browsers to isolate different parts of the page from each other.
A look into what Netscape had earlier with "Data Tainting" and also the "Same Origin Policy" should be considered, which would limit the interaction between content with different origin.
Another catch is the thread based model in applications (mostly a problem for C and C++ applications) instead of a process based model where interprocess communication has to be defined stricter. Any coding mistake in a threa
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This in no way suggests that HTML5 sucks or is evil, it is just something that people need to consider.
Unless in your origina
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I disagree. For example:
1. System has ability to delete your files.
2. System loads file from the Internet. File from the Internet contains instructions.
3. System is designed to accept delete() instructions from users, but not from files downloaded from the Internet.
My idea for quite some time is that in the long run, all file formats become programming languages. A web page should have always been regarded as an application that is sandboxed by the browser, even before we started building apps with
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I was just using file delete as an example of something that a system must be able to do; but that you don't want being done at the request of an arbitrary application.
Perhaps window creation would have been a better example. I don't know how HTML5 is put together. I would hope that creation of new windows outside the frame of the existing browser (ie, popups) would be easy enough to trap in the browser and subject to permissions.
A browser has to be capable of creating popups at the request of the user (o
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Yea! Fuck them!
Gimmah HTML5!
(3 months later)
WTF! My bank account is drained and I can't send email any more! I want my mommy!