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A comment on Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio?. Parent comment

Re:Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio? by vbsteven on Thursday June 27, 2019 @03:10AM (#20292331)
It’s not the internet we want but it is the one we have. In the end it is your own responsibility for which code gets executed on your machine.

I run NoScript with all JS blocked by default and only whitelist the domains I want. On most sites you can get by with no JS or just scripts from the same domain whitelisted. Maybe a CDN from time to time

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Re:Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio? by kowdermeister on Thursday June 27, 2019 @07:07AM (#20293361)
It's indirectly what most people wanted: good content for free.
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Re:Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio? by vbsteven on Thursday June 27, 2019 @09:46AM (#20294266)
In a way yes, but for me it's not about that. It's about not letting everyone and their mother execute their code on my machine for whatever reason. Ads, tracking, cryptomining, surveillance.

Mind you that I am only running NoScript and not a "real" adblocker. Show me ads in a static image and I'm fine with that. Selfhost the ads on your own domain and you are also going to get whitelisted.

I mainly do it for cases like this where Stackoverflow has enabled an ad network that is pushing code to all of their users that is doing some weird things (like querying/opening audio devices) and stackoverflow is not even aware that it is doing that. What if it was a cryptominer?

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Re:Why is Stack Overflow trying to start audio? by seitling on Thursday June 27, 2019 @08:52AM (#20293925)
"... only whitelist the domains I want ..."

Well, this is easy to exploit. Use an URL under my domain and proxy to the ad server. JavaScript is a problem. Simple as that.

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