Active-X, JAVA, Javascript, etc....

[Mark Wilcox]

First rule of the security thumb -- The only to make your computer 
totally safe is to unplug it from the wall, disconnect all floppy 
drives & printers, put it in a vacuum sealed safe and have an armed 
guard around it 24 hours a day.

Second rule of the security thumb --- When the first rule is not 
possible, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!

Third rule -- Get a UPS & a solid anti-virus package & keep up on 
patches to your OS & webserver.

Finally the more powerful & functional something is, the more 
insecure it is...

Active-X is the least secure (at least for client-side browsing) way 
of enhancing a website but offers the best way to more robust, easier 
functionality to either Netscape or IE. This is because it basically 
is the same commands/code that allows for OLE (which allows for such 
things as cut & paste, imbedding Excel worksheets into PowerPoint 
slides which in turn are imbedded into Word documents) except on an 
intranet/internet wide scale. It also allows a webpage designer to 
add a Windows feel to their HTML documents (hey not saying it's the 
best but at 500 million strong there's more Windows people than 
anyone else) as well as greater control over positioning of HTML 
objects.

JAVAscript is about as secure as your going to get and is pretty easy 
to use. It's not nearly as powerful as either JAVA or Active-X but it 
does come in handy.

JAVA is a full blown programming language that I think in the long 
run is really going to revolutionize how we compute. But that's not 
going to be for at least 2 to 3 years. Javascript & Active-X 
technologies are going to be the bread & butter for years to come  
for most non-programmer types (Active-X will  be as easy to 
do as Visual Basic ) and JAVA is going to unseat a good portion of 
C/C++ as language of choice. It has many security features built in 
for running on a network but like any fortress it can be defeated.

The way I look at it, yes there is danger in what someone might 
create but I think the enormous potential for what these technologies 
could do outweighs the bad.

Mark



 
wilcox at lis.unt.edu

http://archive.lis.unt.edu/~mew0002/
Webmaster WWW Archive of Conference Proceedings
http://archive.lis.unt.edu/