Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Even ignoring the sandbox breakout issues, the halting
problem
ultimately means that we can not determine what arbitrary code will
do... The possibilities for vandalism are endless.. Imagine a little
animation of an atom turns into dancing penises for ten minutes on
alternate tuesdays.
Humans can't solve the halting problem either, but despite that, I can
guarantee that there are no hidden dancing penises embedded in the MediaWiki
core. I can do that because it is possible to classify programs into three
categories: bad, suspicious and good. We can reject the suspicious programs,
making it irrelevant what the programmer has hidden in them.
That's not to say I would support having user-supplied Java applets. I agree
with all your other concerns. And it would indeed be difficult (but not
impossible) to review applets.
We've been talking about putting Jmol Java applets on chemical compound
pages, with a MediaWiki extension. When I posted a demo link to #wikipedia,
all I got back were complaints about the long load time, and the performance
impact of starting Java. A JavaScript "click to load" link would be
necessary for usability.
-- Tim Starling