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To Stop BEAST, Mozilla Developer Proposes Blocking Java Framework
rastos1 writes with this news from The Register: "In a demonstration last Friday, it took less than two minutes for researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo to wield the exploit to recover an encrypted authentication cookie used to access a PayPal user account. ... The researchers settled on a Java applet as their means to bypass SOP, leading Firefox developers to discuss blocking the framework in a future version of the browser. ... 'I recommend that we blocklist all versions of the Java Plugin,' Firefox developer Brian Smith wrote on Tuesday in a discussion on Mozilla's online bug forum. 'My understanding is that Oracle may or may not be aware of the details of the same-origin exploit. As of now, we have no ETA for a fix for the Java plugin.'"
Why?
Java is a much nicer development system than say Flash.
Frankly Java applets got a bad rap because of Java abuse. I blame Microsoft for that. You see FrontPage had animated buttons as an option and they where freaking java applets.
No one should have to wait for java just for buttons.
It is a shame that applets have gotten such a bad rep. It is an even bigger shame that Apple and Google are not supporting Java on IOS, Android, and Chrome.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Java plugin based internet apps for enterprise are very common, especially in the CAD/CAM/CAE space because they can run on multiple platforms and some of those spaces are heavily entrenched in UNIX (with a trend toward Linux UNIX-like), and many of those depend on Firefox for cross platform support.