Security Issues

Scripting is what makes the web interactive and fun, and most scripts are harmless. For instance, the scripts on this site mostly show pictures and handle page navigation. If your Javascript settings were disabled, much of the site's content would be invisible to you.

Unfortunately the bad guys also use scripting to hi-jack our computers and/or our attention. So we have to be careful whose  scripts we allow to run on our PCs. As quoted elsewhere and applicable everywhere, trusting the wrong people could cause havoc.

If you are an expert multi-language programmer, you'd probably be in a position to judge which scripts to run and which to block. But most of us are not, so better be safe than sorry. To the best of my knowledge, Javascript does not have permission to write to your computer, so it can't do any harm. Activex (and perhaps other types too?) can do whatever it likes, and you won't even know it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Until such time as I have the time and courage to do the necessary research and write a book on this topic, here are a few quick tips to prevent the nasties from getting their claws on you:

1. Visit this site and choose your weapons. I vote for "Enough is Enough!" but in case you don't want to take such drastic measures, there's also "IEspyad". Both are free.
2. Download and install whichever program you chose.
3. Start surfing in peace and quiet. You may also notice a considerable increase in the overall speed of the Internet.
4. If your favorite sites seem rather blank or unresponsive, simply click your newly acquired "Add to trusted sites"-button (if you chose "Enough is Enough!") to enable their scripts, refresh the page, and they'll come back to life.
5. update: Since switching to Firefox, my PC has become much more stable and responsive. Strange, isn't it? Unfortunately, my software development package still uses the Microsoft engine for rendering the bits that contain html.





6. Download Ad-Aware (also freeware) and scan your PC to remove spyware that may already have been installed without your knowledge.
7. Advise your friends to do the same - if we all block sites that use stealth methods, they become ineffective and might even disappear altogether. What a blissful thought...

Troubleshooting

If you should encounter a message on my website or in some of my software products about Internet Explorer having prevented "potentially harmful scripts" from being executed, don't panic. Why on earth it would get paranoid about page layout scripts   I really don't know, but that's all it is. When you click the "options" button and allow the scripts to run, you'll see that the page layout suddenly looks normal instead of jumbled.

Quite a joke, really, when you compare the hazards of Microsoft's Activex scripting to the safety of DHTML (Javascript +HTML)...