JavaScript security

[Linda Hyman]

>Here at Rice we have Java and Javascript turned off by default
>for security reasons.

I hope that I am not covering old territory and I don't want to start a new
e-mail war; BUT  what precisely (not rumored) are the security issues for
JavaScript and the security issues for Java?  Has anyone heard of anything
actually happening anywhere?

We looked at switching some of our applications to JavaScript but were put
off by the fact that they wouldn't allow us to write to user's local hard
drives (of course, we are not programmers-we are teachers and librarians so
we may have missed something!)

I know there are some folks out there "who never met a programming language
they didn't like"!  and so forth -   so what's the straight skinny?

Linda Woods Hyman-Education First Initiative
Pacific Bell/San Diego State University
Dept. of Educational Technology
San Diego  CA  92182  (619) 594-4414
e-mail:  lhyman at mail.sdsu.edu
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired