Re: how to run application(exe) in browser

The correct approach, and as far as I'm concerned, the ONLY correct approach, is to
require security ACLs for operations that can examine or modify the state of my machine
OTHER than the display state, based upon the EXACT sender. Thus, I can say that the Adobe
Reader DLL that is on my machine can be executed with the ability to read files. This is
because the ability to read files would be controlled by the logged-in user of the
control, which I can designate to be a particular "trusted account". I would add Adobe as
a member of that particular trusted account. This is much more general than the silly
categories we are given in IE, which are meaningless nonsense terms like "Internet",
"Trusted site", etc. I need about six categories of trusted sites, some of which I trust
to read files from the Internet cache, some of which I trust to read files from certain
directories, etc., in the usual way we handle ACLs. It is only the most extremely trusted
sites that I would allow to act as if they are logged in as me. In my case, this is zero.
But a product installed on my machine, such as Adobe reader, I could designate as an
extremely trusted "site". Another ActiveX control that exists on my machine might NOT
receive this designation. By creating some bizarre pseudo-privilege mechanism that does
not actually have any meaning, Microsoft gives us the ILLUSION that there is safety, but
there is not. The reason for all of this is that the whole concept of client-side
scripting was grafted into the Netscape browser, and ActiveX was a proprietary response to
this that had all of the same defects.

In no case am *I* given the right to determine, on a control-by-control basis, what
controls are allowed to do. We have a whole security mechanism in the kernel which is
COMPLETELY IGNORED by these kludges of scripting. Instead, the security is "enforced" by
such silly concepts as asking a control if it is "safe for scripting", and in the entire
history of ActiveX, no control has EVER been written which says it is safe for scripting,
but isn't (and if you believe that, my uncle was an important officer in the Nigerian
army, and I need your help to get his money out of the country...)

ActiveX and JavaScript are horribly designed, and essentially completely ignore the
concept of security except for some half-assed kludges that are hopelessly inadequate. The
whole notion of certificates is an example of a poor solution to a problem that should not
have existed in the first place. If the certificate validation was able to change the
user account of the thread that was executing the code, so that the thread would become a
specified user I designate, I could add an ACL that says "this certificate is in this user
group". Anything less than this is just a piece of bad design.
joe

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:38:28 +0100, Bob Moore <> wrote:

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:04:57 -0700 (PDT), Ajay Kalra wrote:

Signing did nothing other than throw the ball in my court

Which of course is the purpose of the exercise. Typical pointless
lawyer-motivated crapola.
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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