Pay Wall Without The Walls

Oh my giddy aunt! The New York Times pay wall has hit a new level of stupidity. According to this techdirt article, the pay wall is written in... Javascript(!) and is trivially bypassed with NoScript enabled.

WTF? Who the hell wpould use client side code to create a pay wall? And who the hell would pay someone to write something so ridiculous? Well, someone at the New York Times apparently. Heads should roll for this embarrassing mistake.

Interestingly, the paywall is active in Chromium with Javascript disabled, which indicates the difference in Chromium's blocking capabilities compared to NoScript. Lack of NoScript is one of the reasons I am no longer so enthusiastic about Google's browser.

Hmm, note to self: must look at Firefox 4 again now that it has been released...

Google Wave And NoScript

One nuisance that I've encountered with Google Wave preview, is that some extensions and NoScript Firefox addon don't get along too well. The extensions are not hosted on Google's servers which triggers NoScript's cross site scripting blocker, unless you add that server to NoScript's whitelist.

Wave's developers will need to address this. While it is only a nuisance now, as more extensions become available, it will become a security problem. Having to whitelist every third party extension site is an opportunity just begging to be exploited.