[LINK] Study shows pop-up warnings are ineffective

[Stilgherrian]

On 30/09/2008, at 9:58 AM, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> Given the prevalence of "Web 2.0" sites, is it even practical these  
> days
> to disable JS? Web coders seem addicted to it, and use it often in  
> place
> of Good Ole HTML constructs.


No matter what we do with computers on Teh Internetz, there needs to  
be program code running on the end user's computer as well as on the  
remote server. It doesn't matter whether the code is JavaScript in a  
web browser, a web browser in an operating system, an operating system  
on the "bare metal" of a processor chip, whatever... from a logical  
point of view the problem is precisely the same. The code has to come  
from *somewhere*, through some channel that we must implicitly trust.

Every single trust mechanism we try to build must sit on top of some  
trusted layer below, and we *must* trust that the layer provided to us  
does nothing more nor less than advertised. We simply cannot check all  
of its outputs against its inputs because (1) we don't have the time,  
the universe won't last that long, and (2) Kurt Gödel proved that it's  
impossible anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

Live with it.

Or, since we cannot trust it, stop using computers (or mathematics) NOW.

Stil


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