Legal Commentary

NoScript Consdered Dangerous?

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

This is really interesting. Accoding to Adblock Plus and (a little) more: Attention NoScript users, one ostensibly pro-privacy firefox plugin, NoScript, was quietly interfering with the actions of another, Adblock, in order to force the first extensions ads on the user. When called on it, however, they (seem to have) stopped.

Are we in for a new round of extension wars?

What makes the charges particularly serious in this case is the allegation of not just lack of transparency, but active obfuscation, in updates of NoScript.

I’ve long used both Adblock and NoScript, but I’m seriously thinking of taking NoScript off my computer now.

Meanwhile, I’ve changed a setting in firefox’s about:config to stop the NoScript changelog from coming up every time there’s a minor version change (set noscript.firstRunRedirection to false). And I manually removed googlesyndication.com from NoScript’s white list. If I find it reappeared after an update, NoScript is toast. And maybe even if it doesn’t.

Then again, it seems as if the warring developers may be making peace.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on May 02, 2009 (boomark / email).