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Re: [h-e-w] Windows Binaries


From: David Vanderschel
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] Windows Binaries
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2012 15:11:13 -0500

I must apologize profusely for my incorrect "good news". I really thought I had Javascript blocked in Dropbox. But, in view of Ed's remarks, I just tried it again; and, as Ed claims, it does not work when blocking the Javascript from the Dropbox site. Sorry about that.

However, unless someone can enlighten me to the contrary, what I would still claim to be true is that you can block the nonfree Javascript code on the Dropbox site without losing the download capability. I will explain in the following paragraph.

The Javascript for the Dropbox site is already open in the sense that the source code may be examined. Indeed, I have looked over all of it myself. There are five files. One of them, ga.js, is for google-analytics, and it is downloaded from google-analytics.com. Though it could still be argued that ga.js is open, its license is most definitely not free. (See http://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html ) Nevertheless, I can still block google-analytics without losing the function of the Dropbox site for the purpose of downloading. (In fact, I do block google-analytics everywhere.) The remaining four files are downloaded from Dropbox.com. One of them, zxcvb.js, is in a minified form that is hard to read. zxcvb.js is a password strength assessment program developed by the Dropbox folks and made freely available to the world. (See https://tech.dropbox.com/?p=165 ) In addition to readable source, it's Iicense is presented on github: https://github.com/lowe/zxcvbn That license is extremely permissive - the only requirement being that "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." The remaining three files are small and readable. Two of them, password_strength.js and logger.js, have no copyright notice or associated license at all. The one that does have an associated license, dropbox-mini.js, is released under the GPL. Isn't all this free enough?

Note that the NoScript add-on for Firefox, which I use to block google-analytics (and lots of other stuff), is itself open source and free under the GPL.

I think Paul Eggert's command-line curl.exe approach is a good way to use the Dropbox repository if all Javascript must be avoided.

Regards,
 David V.


----- Original Message ----- From: "E. Caudex" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 2:46 PM
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] Windows Binaries


Die Thu Oct 04 2012 03:09:06 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) Richard
Stallman <address@hidden> scripsit:

In Firefox I have all Javascript for the Dropbox site blocked by the NoScript AddOn for Firefox. I successfully downloaded the emacs-trunk-r110346-w32-i386.zip file from there. I think that this does mean that the page can be accessed and used without
    executing any Javascript code at all, free or not.

That is good news.


I am running the same browser (ver 15) under w64 with NoScript and I
can't get to the binaries without allowing dropbox.com. I see:

The Dropbox website requires JavaScript.

What are you doing to get around JavaScript?

Ed





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