[Techtalk] why is Active X in web pages evil, but not Perl/PHP/Javascript?

[gebhard dettmar]

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On Wednesday 19 January 2005 23:03, Almut Behrens wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 03:41:33PM -0600, Kathryn Hogg wrote:
> > Kai MacTane said:
> > > At 1/19/05 09:58 AM , Walt wrote:
> > >
> > > The fact that MSIE is the only browser that ever can or ever will
> > > run ActiveX is another part of the evil, yes. But I don't consider
> > > that nearly as evil as the security problems mentioned above.
> >
> > I've heard of an ActiveX plugin for Firefox.  Of course this will only
> > run on Windoze.
>
> Hopefully!!   Honestly, I do hope that they won't ever seriously
> consider making it available for the Linux platform -- in some mood
> like "oh, while we're at it", or "now that we've already implemented
> a large part of it, why not...".
> I can't get fully rid of that latent fear, though... ;(
Well, I think the problem already exists with MSIE used via wine. A web 
designer may need it because it's
a) the most standard unconform browser and
b) the most used one
so a web designer working under Linux may want to check her/his code 
without rebooting in Windows all the time. Of course, malicious 
Active-X-Controls rely on Windows filesystems, structure, libraries etc. 
(new c't discusses this issue - but quite vague) but this may change as 
the acceptance of Linux is growing rapidly. Unpleasant thing to be 
confronted with problems, we never had - just to be able to see Excel 
sheets in a browser ;-(
> Almut
regards gebhard
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