Re:Don't touch my clipboard
by dredmorbius on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @03:49AM
(#22354477)
We've been through the blacklisting argument numerous times: spam, viruses, adware, malware, spyware, browser adblocking, etc.
It ... ultimately doesn't scale. The black-hat namespaces are too large, and treating as TOFU eventually proves untenable.
Advanced features -- anything beyond rendering basic HTML, and I'd be quite prepared to argue for a very limited subset of that -- should be expressly prohibited unless enabled.
The trick is to make enabling reasonably painless and consequence-free (e.g., enable into a sandbox). There are still the problems of users gratuitously enabling anything and everything (especially when prompted through website notifications, pop-ups, phishing and vishing social engineering attacks, etc.), as well as the problem of largely invisible second and higher-order effects.
But the key is to cut down on the effectiveness of such methods, to impose costs on websites for employing them, and to make black-hat attacks through these too expensive by reducing the herd susceptibility to the attacks (the unbocking would have to occur on a one-at-a-time case-by-case basis, e.g., it's expensive and has limited scalability).
I don't think we'll actually see this for another 5-10 years (my usual sane-suggestion take-up lead time, it seems), but It Would Certainly Be Nice To See.
It ... ultimately doesn't scale. The black-hat namespaces are too large, and treating as TOFU eventually proves untenable.
Advanced features -- anything beyond rendering basic HTML, and I'd be quite prepared to argue for a very limited subset of that -- should be expressly prohibited unless enabled.
The trick is to make enabling reasonably painless and consequence-free (e.g., enable into a sandbox). There are still the problems of users gratuitously enabling anything and everything (especially when prompted through website notifications, pop-ups, phishing and vishing social engineering attacks, etc.), as well as the problem of largely invisible second and higher-order effects.
But the key is to cut down on the effectiveness of such methods, to impose costs on websites for employing them, and to make black-hat attacks through these too expensive by reducing the herd susceptibility to the attacks (the unbocking would have to occur on a one-at-a-time case-by-case basis, e.g., it's expensive and has limited scalability).
I don't think we'll actually see this for another 5-10 years (my usual sane-suggestion take-up lead time, it seems), but It Would Certainly Be Nice To See.