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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

This is for the chromeos devices/managed chrome browsers [1]. From the bug [2] it looks like this was relevant in a school setting, where this is common. So the school hands out some chromebooks and wants to use that managed environment to prevent kids cheating on quizzes by looking at source code.

DRM and related technologies are an effort to wrest control of devices away from their owners, and give control the manufacturers and software companies. For managed devices, this is a bit more reasonable (a school should be able to manage its devices I suppose) but the technological framework here also eliminates software freedom.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7532419?hl=en [2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=895462

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It also prevents kids from using their machine to learn how to write HTML. What an incredibly short-sighted change. If kids can see the answers to their quizzes in the source code, purchase better software that doesn't allow that.

Why would viewing HTML+JS source-code reveal correct answers to a school quiz? It certainly doesn’t have to.

Maybe a case of shortsightedness, thinking, that they need to solve it in a javascript single page app framework and then forgot the basics about client server architecture, sending the solutions to the frontend, to check them right there. A beginner mistake.

Or just nobody did care. Contractor's main expense are kickbacks and actual product is made by cheapest subcontractor.

... then don't that behaviour lead to a browser that honours the cheap stakes?

Any script that was doing a password comparison client-side was laughed at in the past -- rightly so --, but now that MS & Google see a business case it's fine? (And a password being a secret, is basically the same as the answer to a question).

Even worse: the existence of this feature (now merged) can be used to justify writing crappy code, because this is the "security" mechanism (as opposed to the proper way: not sending the answers to the client).

The existence of badly-written apps that rely on this crutch become justification for keeping this stupid feature in.

Lazy admins will use `view-source: *` rather than blocking specific sites.

So frustrating: Everyone doing bad/lazy things 'wins', and the users suffer because now these devices basically can't be used to learn or do web development.

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