Non-bike alert: WTOP web site hacked last week

I use Google Chrome for most websites, but many people still use IE. (I use IE for a couple sites that don’t work well with non-IE browsers.)

I have the ScriptSafe extension on Google, similar to No Script on Firefox. It’s useful and provides a measure of protection against malware. But it’s not without its own issues. It can slow down some sites. On many sites, you have to go through the list of scripts and enable them one by one to use those sites. (This happens often with news sites that include video clips, surveys, slideshows, etc. Most of those elements don’t work when all the scripts are blocked.) Even though the extension “remembers” which domains you have allowed previously, some scripts still have to be reenabled for each visit. One example is Amazon.com and the music previews. If I try to listen to a preview of an MP3, I have to go through the list of scripts and allow the peer-to-peer service that Amazon uses for those audio clips. Then when I try to listen to another preview of that same album, I have to click on the Play button and go to ScriptSafe and reenable the new sub-domain scripts to listen to that clip. And so on.

(The ScriptSafe author also messed around with the extension last year and inadvertently caused the extension to “forget” all script authorizations on every person’s compute. So if I had enabled YouTube or Yahoo in the past, I would have to go back and set up the extension again, site by site, and script by script. This was the case for every ScriptSafe user who updated the extension that month.)

While the script blockers do help with Internet security, I can’t really see every Web surfer using these extensions and plugins on a regular basis. I get aggravated by the need to enable scripts, especially when I just want to see a slideshow or video clip. Most casual surfers would get so fed up with the process that they would stop visiting those sites (including most mainstream news and info sites) or ask someone to uninstall the extension. (I don’t think a lot of people know how to enable and disable extensions, even though it’s a simple process.) I sometimes get tempted to uninstall ScriptSafe myself because of the extra hassles, but I keep sticking with it. It was the same thing when I used to use Firefox and NoScript. I may have actually turned off NoScript at one point because of the slow browsing and hassles.