• cecilkorik@piefed.ca
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    5 hours ago

    I agree. It should be an opt-in permission, per-site, with the possibility to silently auto-reject always by default. Same with all the other advanced APIs like Wifi-Geolocation and WebGL etc, as they already mostly in my browser (Librewolf). These APIs are a trojan horse for fingerprinting, and it shows. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t mind disabling them by default.

    • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 hours ago

      Ah my bad. Commenter you’re replying to is saying we never should have built this capability, and it’s a terrible idea (my own words now) to weaken boundaries to this degree, it can never be done “safely”.

      But it does exist, and your own request to opt in is reasonable and would mark an improvement.

      spoiler

      My initial hasty comment: What? No, it shouldn’t exist. Either I’m trippin or you missed the point of the comment you’re responding to.

      “Opt-in” (your preference) can only exist if the capability exists. Comment says it shouldn’t. Commenter is correct.

      What is it you are saying…?

      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Honestly, this is such a shortsighted take. Awesome, instead of a simple “Allow?” dialogue to give the sandboxed website access to one specific USB device through an (over time) more and more well-tested implementation, we have to download untrusted binaries that by default get full access to large amounts of user data.

        What are you so afraid of? It’s already been live in Chromium browsers for a while, and the sky hasn’t fallen. And I’m convinced it has largely improved security for users who flash Arduino-like devices, smart home stuff, some phones and a bunch of keyboard/mouse stuff.

        • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 hours ago

          I don’t use Chromium browsers. I’m afraid of the sky falling (it is). I have been “afraid” of it for a good long while, and it is occurring.

          That’s general - in this specific case, by my reckoning, it can never be safe for a website to understand, in any depth, the hardware of the machine requesting it.