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No One Should Have To Use Proprietary Software To Communicate With Their Government (fsf.org)

Donald Robertson, writing for Free Software Foundation: Proprietary JavaScript is a threat to all users on the Web. When minified, the code can hide all sorts of nasty items, like spyware and other security risks. [...] On March 1st, 2016, the Copyright Office announced a call for comments on an update to their technology infrastructure. We submitted a comment urging them to institute a policy that requires all software they develop and distribute to be free software. Further, we also urged them to not require people to run proprietary software in order to communicate or submit comments to them. Unfortunately, once again, the Copyright Office requires the use of proprietary JavaScript in order to submit the comment and they are only accepting comments online unless a person lacks computer or Internet access. [...] The most absurd part of all this is that other government agencies, while still using Regulations.gov, are perfectly capable of offering alternatives to submission.

2 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Treasury 'Foreign Accounts' form by david.emery · · Score: 5, Informative

    Last year (2014), I had to download Adobe Acrobat to submit a form to the US Treasury dept. The only way you could do this was Acrobat, it used PDF and Adobe proprietary form submission. (I couldn't use Apple Preview.app to fill out the form.)

    This year (2015), Treasury added the obvious alternative, a fully on-line Web form. I guess that's progress.

  2. Re:ECMAScript? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Open in Chrome. Hit F12. Choose Sources. Click the JS file you want to inspect. Click { } for "Pretty Print". Done.

    What was the issue again? Oh wait, there isn't one.