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Konqueror Supporting ActiveX
brunes69 notes that you can read the news that konqueror is supporting ActiveX. I saw it being done at at LinuxTag (as well as wine running The Sims!) so its coming. This ought to do a lot to give Linux users compatibility on sites the force shockwave or other obnoxious activex plug-ins.
> Should we be developing substitutes or alternatives for ActiveX instead of trying to recreate it?
Who is this "we" you speak of? Are you doing any development for any open source project? Specifically, are you working on Wine? If not, then it is not your "we" to consider. Obviously, the people working on this find it worthwhile. If you feel that other projects should be worked on, then devote your effort to those. The developer effort of the Wine project is not your's to command.
> Get your priorities straight: Linux ought to be an alternative, not a poor imitation.
Those are *your* priorities. They happen to be mine as well, but that isn't the point. Developers have their own goals, so you shouldn't expect them to work toward *your's* instead.
In particular, I think Miguel is overly fond of copying Microsoft. It's not how I would develop Gnome, but I'm not the one doing it...Miguel and the others are, and they will do it how they see fit. But you and I have no authority over them, so they will continue to develop as they please.
--Lenny
Both developments has their good and bad sides.
ActiveX support can be very important in multi-OS work environments and for many on-line banking sites, for example.
On the other hand, sandboxing it and turning it off by default doesn't sound like a bad idea. But don't worry, as long as this requires Wine CVS and as long as the activexproxy is a program in kdenonbeta, it won't be installed by default on your distribution.
Same with the new Ximian developments: embracing and cooperating with SOAP sounds like a good idea.
I _would_ be very careful about .NET development since it is basically Microsoft's proprietary lock-in platform to make sure SOAP will give them _more_ control, not _less_, but cooperation is good. Even so, it is not like we KDE people are totally against SOAP support, some projects already use it.
Furthermore, I like to stress that ActiveX support originated as a proof-of-concept and "cool factor" development. The responses we received at LinuxTag confirmed this.
...I can deactivate ActiveX support under Linux, too. Great!
God, root, what is difference? - Pitr
Well, there's another, more important, piece of work going on according to the article. They're trying to get QuickTime working as well! This is much more important than (bad, security flawed) activeX. Being able to watch movie trailers, streaming media from more sources, etc. is much more fun and useful than shockwave.
Wine is good, but I can't get it to run QuickTime, though I try with every revision. I can reliably get Windows Media Player to run under Wine, but that's not good enough. This is one place where Linux sucks; we'll never get decent streaming multimedia support (Real doesn't cut it!) until someone licenses the codecs and releases a product (which will cause all the GPL freaks to scream because they'll want to charge for it; you may think I'm flaming, but every damn time I read something about good comercial software here, most people just complain that it's not free!).
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Konqueror is getting support for The Force? Sweet! Or is it just Force-compatible? Sigh... I was so looking forward to saying,
to Internet Explorer... .
There is one thing that isn't to clear in the press releases: As Wine is i386 only, the support for activeX is of course only available for KDE running on Intel I386 architechture.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Blockquoth navindra:
Ack! No!
There's a common misconception out there that nobody has some special super-unpriveleged status. That's not the case; nobody is no different from any other account.
The user/group nobody should only be used as it was originally intended, to limit access with UUCP. If you're not using UUCP on your system, you should be able to remove nobody and the system shouldn't even know the difference.
If you make something suid or sgid nobody, then you're giving that something and anybody/anything that runs it access to important parts of your UUCP subsystem, if said sybsystem exists.
If you make two things suid or sgid nobody, you're giving both access to UUCP and you're giving them access to each other.
If you make both your Web server and your database server run as nobody, then nobody has become almost as powerful as root! Run unknown foreign executables as nobody as well, and you'll deserve what you get.
People, please don't use nobody for anything. Instead, create a new account just for that one special purpose. Your Web server should run as user httpd (or www or whatever you choose). Your datbase server should run as user mysql (or whatever). Your name server should run as named. If one gets compromised, it only has access to that one subsystem (though, granted, even that can be tragic).
For what it's worth, OpenBSD has no files or directories owned by either user or group nobody, though a few things do run as user nobody (such as the cron job to update the locate database and the fingerd and identd daemons).
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
What's next, are they going to port the BSOD to be some daemon that runs and randomly crashes the system to be more compatible with Windows?
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Why is KDE relying on ActiveX? Shouldn't we be developing a better technology instead of using Micro$oft's?
Leaving aside the question of who the "we" is who is always invoked in such remarks, this is a clever, useful hack by a couple of developers that's in kdenonbeta. No one is proposing to build KDE around ActiveX, no one is telling companies to stop making native plugins and it's not like a significant drain on resources went into making it.
Isn't this a huge security risk?
On the KDE site's discussion, Malte mentioned they were working on a chroot-based sandboxing method. This is still a work in progress and they tell you not to use it on sites you don't trust. And for God's sake, don't run it as root!! It's not going into the 2.2 release and anyone who is capable of installing it today ought to have the sense to run it carefully.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.