[Bug 6606] generic 3rd-party <mark>, Smart Tags, and Activities prevention

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6606





--- Comment #10 from Nick Levinson <Nick_Levinson@yahoo.com>  2009-06-29 09:25:19 ---
(Correcting minor errors in my last post: "While" should have been "Because"
and "owners'" should have been a plural, not a genitive.)

=====

HTML5 changes the legal status by granting permission where none was before. If
it was before, I must have missed it; can anyone cite any provision of HTML
4.01 or XHTML 1.0 that grants a third party any permission to change what
people see of a site without the owner's consent? If not, then this is new.

Cracking, spamming, phishing, DDoS, etc. is a large industry underground, but
is dwarfed by aboveground industry. McMafia, a book by a former BBC reporter,
reports that the underground economy adds about 20-25% to gross world product;
the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (the principal tax collectors) has estimated
about 10% of the national economy is illegally unreported. If most of the
world's economy was suddenly run by major felons, a widely spread-out Internet
would be hopelessly corrupted, with standards being vague, backbone operators
bribed, etc. It's mostly not; that's hardly ever even alleged. Criminals tend
to stay away from audit trails unless they have a confederate; abovegrounders
tend to fix them. Most of the world acts approximately legally. Legal
permissions have real effects. When telecom companies in the U.S. came up with
the bad idea that was defeated through the net neutrality movement, the
telecoms came up with that within a few weeks of gaining the legal permission
that was prerequisite. Once the legal permission for third-party markup is
present, aboveground industry will gradually split between those wanting mainly
to exploit it and those needing mainly to defend themselves and their sites as
perceived by innocent users.

Thanks.

-- 
Nick


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Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 09:25:37 UTC