On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 9:21 PM, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
One element I can answer: no, it does not contain flash objects, flash is not a technology included in the Wikimedia stack on account of it barely being classifiable as a technology.
There is one use of Flash in our tech stack: audio output for media playback on Internet Explorer when using our JavaScript Ogg playback compatibility library.
This is a small shim which does not use cookies or any other type of local storage, which is why it is not listed on a page about cookies.
Here's the source code of the Flash component; feel free to review it for security:
https://github.com/brion/audio-feeder/blob/master/src/dynamicaudio.as
On Sunday, 1 May 2016, Toby Dollmann toby.dollmann@gmail.com wrote:
- Whether, or not, editors of Wikimedia websites", say
"en.wikipedia.org" or "commons.wikimedia.org", can edit if cookies (broadly construed) are disabled and not stored on client devices.
Like every other site on the world wide web, MediaWiki uses cookies to maintain login state. If you disable cookies, login will not work and your edits will not be attributed to your account.
Editing "anonymously" without cookies works, but reveals your IP address in a permanent public way.
- Whether, or not, the locally stored objects referenced in the
cookie policy include (i) Javascript code, or
MediaWiki's ResourceLoader can and does cache JavaScript module code in localStorage. This code has no special privileges or abilities because of that; it just takes up a tiny bit of space on your disk.
(ii) Flash objects
No, no Flash code is stored in cookies or localStorage.
- Whether, or not, the locally stored objects inserted by the WMF, on
client computers and stored there, have the capability of collecting extensive personal information of editors, the degree of which not being explicitly disclosed in advance to users.
No, they are just data until they are executed, at which point they are just code, same as code loaded straight from the server. That code can do nothing special that it could not already do.
-- brion