New bug found in Microsoft's Core Services

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I have a serious question

The idea of a webpage being able to run code directly on your machine is horrific and unnecessary.

I don't totally disagree and that is a small part of why I use Firefox. My question is: how do Firefox extensions differ from ActiveX in the security arena? To be honest, I know very little about how extensions are written so I'm curious about this.

The other thing I'll say is that all browsers run code from the user's machine. Every time you render an image, run javascript, or view a PDF file, you are running code on the user's machine. The biggest issue I see with ActiveX is not that it allows a web page to run code from a user's machine (something that happens all the time anyway) but that it is an opt-out thing instead of an opt-in thing. This is one of the things about IE7 that will make it, in my opinion, much safer and make the ActiveX threat much more minimal.

It also can't be stressed enough that you should not be browsing as root/Administrator and even so, you should back up any personal files you aren't willing to lose since, even as a restricted rights user, all your personal files are still vulnerable. Running as a restricted rights user isn't the security panacea that some make it out to be, but it is still better than running as root!

Posted by: NonZealot   Posted on: 11/07/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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