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> ...say that code should be a considered a privilege and not a right, or that it doesn't really belong on the web at all, despite javascript being on the web for ~20 years now.

Same could be said about advertising and I'm infringing on all these innocent corporations' natural rights by running an adblocker.

For random code to run on my machine a few (IMHO reasonable) steps need to happen: 1) somehow entice me to click on a link 2) get past AdBlock 3) get past Privacy Badger

Seems like a privilege to me --and I'm not someone who cares all that much about the shenaganians the big webcorps get up to since I have no money so spend on their ad campaigns anyway.



Be aware that Adblock doesn’t block all JavaScript code. It blocks code after people have identified that code X run on website Y does something bad (tracking, ads, etc) and they decided to block it. This works well for visible ads because people see them. For tracking scripts, it still happens because most of them have obvious giveaways (come from a different domain, etc) but chances are that you still run random code because it is better hidden (comes from the same domain and does nothing obvious bad). Just because you use Adblock, malicious code will still be able to run. You are just less likely to notice it because it does nothing obvious so people don’t notice it as quickly and it will not get blocked. If you don’t want to run malicious code at all unless you trust this website, you should probably consider running NoScript.


> Be aware that Adblock doesn’t block all JavaScript code.

That's fine as long as it keeps the annoying stuff to a minimum and Privacy Badger seems to do a good job on the tracking stuff.


I get that (and that’s why I use it too) but you made it sound like Adblock is blocking malicious code and thus you do not need to worry about Spectre and meltdown, which is defentily not true (though it does prevent some malicious code).




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