You might occasionally be surprised what well-known and well-traversed sites will do. A few years ago (circa late 2000 or early 2001) I ran into a situation where the website for the Cartoon Network was using Javascript to change browser preferences (in particular, the home page) and to prevent the user from leaving the site, the net effect being that even after a reboot, the only way to visit any other website was to disable Javascript. The computer where I ran into this was still using IE5 at the time, and users kept going to that site, and then I'd get called down to fix it again, so what I ended up doing was using a hosts file entry to redirect that site to 10.0.13.13 or somesuch. Of course, a modern web browser won't allow such schenanighans, and the site in question stopped doing it a few weeks later anyway, but my point is that it's not safe to assume all well-known and well-traversed sites are also well-written and innocuous.

Then there's the small matter of what the advertisers who buy ad space on well-known and well-traversed sites will do. If you trust doubleclick.net to run arbitrary scripts on your system, you're insane, IMO.

In reply to Re: Has a line been crossed by this user by jonadab
in thread Has a line been crossed by this user by PhilHibbs

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.