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Comment by nly | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying this for years. It's not even just security: you're also potentially leaking all your visitor stats to a third party (IP, user agent, the pages they visit (via the Referer)), and effectively giving jquery.com a third party supercookie over thousands of domains.

I surf with third party cookies and referers (via RefControl) disabled, and these should be the defaults

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I've been called an idiot (even here on HN) for being paranoid about loading scripts from all over the web. I think it's a losing battle and my side is going the way of the dinosaurs.

As tools like uBlock and uMatrix get widespread adoption more and more people are realizing how much extraneous junk is being loaded by webpages. I think your side is slowly but surely gaining followers.

Which is an interesting problem as to stop loading all these scripts I have to give another script access to everything I see.

If you download the source for uBlock/uMatrix, and run locally you avoid the auto-updating of the add-on while being able to vet the source.

Thank you, that's an extremely good idea.

I use uMatrix, and I have already whitelisted loading scripts from common CDNs as global rules. They're everywhere and I found myself just constantly whitelisting them anyway.

The trend for a long time was to cite using a CDN as a best practice, but no one ever calls out the downsides when making such statements. In this case, you lose control of the code and allow third-party access to your users' browsers.

To be fair, it has some positives: like said CDN being able to patch somelib.js to fix a security issue and thereby protect thousands of sites at once.

At the moment though, proposed solutions to trusting third parties with your Javascript, like the W3C proposal to put cryptographic hashes in to your <script> tags etc, don't even consider these potential positives. So we're likely going to end up with the worst of both worlds.

If anything this is just enough facet of the weakness of the web as an app platform (Real solution: all sites serving client side libs should use package management, scripts should be digitally signed by the authors). As it stands it's far too common for people to just unzip WordPress or whatever in to their docroot, and so server-side code doesn't even get updated, let alone client-side code.

The same could be told about other third party resources, like images and css files, too.

Maybe, but hotlinking images has historically been considered rude at best, and theft at worst. And most people still host their own CSS because it tends to come with whatever app, or theme, they're using.

In any case, the defaults I live with cover all the other web resources too.

Well, pixel tracking actually exists.

http://digiday.com/platforms/explainer-why-pixel-tracking-is...

> you're also potentially leaking all your visitor stats

Not just potentially but (f)actually!

Could this be illegal? I mean the EU for example has pretty strict requirements on what you can do with user information.

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