Re:No Formats, no Format Wars
by asciilifeform on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @04:18PM
(#2117432)
> it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible.
This is a moral, rather than technological problem. Anyone writing any kind of code can choose to make life less-pleasant for those who will read it.
Under current architectures, you do not even have the option of making life pleasant for those who wish to read the code that is presently running on their machine, at the time it runs. In fact, the very idea sounds like schizophrenic soapbox heresy to most people. Which is a crying shame.
You're missing the point. Currently, I do not have to run proprietary software to use the Web. Under your design, I would have to surrender control of my computer to arbitrary third parties to use even the most basic features.
Re:No Formats, no Format Wars
by asciilifeform on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @04:27PM
(#2117476)
What kind of control do you presently have over your computer, that would be taken away?
Current CPUs come with hypervisors; running native code need not lead to any loss of control. Sanely designed CPUs would give the user yet more control.
What sort of code the hardware executes is irrelevant to whether that code is Free. JavaScript is high-level and mostly human-readable, but it's trivial to obfuscate JavaScript such that modification by the user is difficult or impossible. And JavaScript is a relatively limited language; a LISP-like language executed directly by the hardware could be even more difficult to modify.