Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The first party to create a universal micropayment system for the web that is really usable is going to make it very big imo.

It would be a viable alternative to the ad supported model.

Most websites operate on very small fractions of a cent per pageview, you would have to have an extremely low overhead to make it work.

Say you pay a monthly subscription to the payment service provider, they then do all the bookkeeping based on a .js tag that is embedded on the page that you visit.

If you don't have an account the .js redirects you to the signup page for the payments service provider, you register, pay your initial fee and continue to browse.

You might even end up saving online newspapers in the process.

View on HN

I completely agree with you.

I would easily spend 5 or 10 cents to read an interesting article, multiple times per day, especially a well written article from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

. . . which falls apart for people who don't allow JavaScript to execute in the browser. This would definitely impact some Websites more than others.

The number of pepople who don't allow JS in the browser is vanishingly small and are probably (mostly) the paranoid type who wouldn't use an internet payment service anyway. IMO.

I think you are highly confused about the intersection of "people who don't allow random code execution on their machines" and "people who would like a secure micropayment service."

I don't think I'm confused. I think perhaps many people who browse with JS deliberately turned off (for these reasons) misunderstand the multifaceted nature of security and place irrational weight on the fact that the JS is intended to execute on their machine. A remotely exploitable hole in JS is pretty much exactly the same as a hole in any other of the dozens of components of your browser. I would be much more worried about subtle holes in the myriad of closed-source media plugins you probably don't even know are there, and worse, can be loaded by ad networks.

A much better point against JS would have been about XSS or similar. Yes, that's still a real risk, but incidents seem to be on the decline as it's become standard web developer practise to guard against it. And that's only ever a single-site vulnerability, not the local-machine arbitrary-code-execution exploit you seemed to allude to.

But even if I am confused about all that, I'm certainly not wrong about the numbers - it's about 5% IIRC, and going down. JS is here to stay, is becoming a necessity on many sites, and everyone's just going to have to deal with that.

I don't really think I'm confused.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but "of course you don't." If you did, you would change your opinion.

* I think the majority of people who browse with JS deliberately turned off are misinformed*

Even if so, they are the same so-called 'paranoid' people to whom a secure (and hopefully anonymous) micropayment platform appeals.

And even if I am confused about that I'm certainly not wrong about the numbers, they're minute.

What is important is not absolute numbers. I reckon that school teachers comprise a minute portion of all web surfers. I doubt that Patrick would use this as a reason to exclude such from his Bingo Card Creator site.

I consider myself to be super-paranoid and would welcome with open arms a proper cryptographically secure internet payment system.

You would think that one could generalize this.

Sorry, I updated my comment to sound a little less argumentative. Somehow it always comes out wrong ..

I've done my dues in network admin and I can assure you that informed users like yourself are in the minority. I've only ever known a couple of people who turned off JS as a matter of course and they did so for all the wrong reasons, as I mentioned above. I am sure you can imagine the type of "power user" I am talking about.

Anyone who is actually informed about these security issues tends to mitigate them behaviourally. It's like antivirus. Most of the clued-up tech people I know do not constantly run antivirus software; they don't need to because they never take any action which might lead to virus infection. They might scan once a week or month or something.

It's the same with JS, IMO - if you know about the real issues with it, you also know how to avoid them, and you wouldn't ham-fistedly cripple the rest of your browsing experience in the process.

> A much better point against JS would have been about XSS or similar.

I don't think anyone was making a point against JavaScript in terms of vulnerabilities in the JavaScript interpreter itself. If you read the statement to which you reply, you might notice that the parent comment referred to people wanting to avoid execution of code from the Internet on the machine -- not about whether JavaScript is itself directly vulnerable.

> the local-machine arbitrary-code-execution exploit you seemed to allude to.

I didn't get that impression at all.

"I didn't get that impression at all."

Sorry - as mentioned in my other reply at this level, I really was imagining a certain type of person (in fact, a certain person) as I typed that, and kind of went off on my own.

Still:

"you might notice that the parent comment referred to people wanting to avoid execution of code from the Internet on the machine"

I maintain this is a largely irrational fear. The very phrase "execution of code" is very blurry when it comes to the web browser. And one hitherto unknown bug in an image or (closed source) PDF library and you're "executing code from the internet" too, and at a far more dangerous level of access than anything inside the JS sandbox.

I don't really see how the equivalent of "I'm already at risk, so I may as well be at further risk" is an effective counterargument.

Ah, yes, the old "I like to turn away certain classes of customers because I don't think well of them!" approach to market share. That works well.

I don't have one opinion or another about the customers, all I know is that you can build a viable business without catering to everybody. 92+% of the visitors to the sites that I look after have java support, 97%+ have javascript.

I don't think the remaining 3% are going to be the ones to make or break such an application.

Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java and javascript shut off.

> Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java . . . shut off.

Actually, I do visit those sites without Flash automatically playing in my browser. In fact, I use a script to download YouTube videos and play them locally with a media player. I'm not sure what Java has to do with being able to use Facebook or YouTube at all.

JavaScript is pretty ubiquitous, but stuff like Google Maps still degrades usably for those who aren't using JavaScript (for instance), as do the sites and Web applications I design.

I think that explicitly throwing away 3% of your potential users is pretty short-sighted, especially when it's for something as lame as "Well, they don't use JavaScript, and I could do this stuff with other technologies too." I wonder why people don't think of, for instance, the blind using screen readers when they utter platitudes about how the 3% don't matter.

This is called Contenture. http://www.contenture.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com