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

[chris hardy]

ActiveX in particular is bad - it's essentially a COM object that runs with
full user permissions with access to the registry and local file system.  

I'd imagine the only way to run it on Linux would be in an emulated
environment ... as a matter of fact, it's a pretty good argument for ONLY
running windows in an emulated environment. 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/components/activex/security.asp

hth
-chris