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Comment by basementcat | Hacker News Reader

If your machine is air gapped and/or not running random downloaded code, I think it is a possible reasonable option.

It's a tragedy that so many websites insist on having the ability to run random downloaded code on our systems to do basic things like displaying simple text and images. Things browsers are capable of with nothing but HTML. Google refuses to even show search results, a bunch of literal hyperlinks, without javascript being enabled.

> Google refuses to even show search results, a bunch of literal hyperlinks, without javascript being enabled.

DuckDuckGo works fine with no JS.

It mostly works. I get a lot of "No results." and !images doesn't work

The real tragedy is that our processors try to win a bit more speed by sacrificing simplicity and therefore increasing the chances of such exploits. The other tragedy is that our operating systems are obsolete and have worthless security. Back in the day when UNIX was relevant, a hundred people could use it at the same on a mainframe with no fear of it breaking, now one person cannot safely use a single computer.

> The real tragedy is that our processors try to win a bit more speed by sacrificing simplicity and therefore increasing the chances of such exploits.

This gets repeated on every thread about speculative execution exploits, but I think people who say this are underestimating how huge the difference would be. I suspect processors without speculative execution would be many times slower, not "a bit".

Unix systems protected against a physical person trying to read or modify another persons file. They did not stop programs run by the user reading the users own data unexpectedly which is now considered unacceptable but was previously the norm.

I got bad news: those systems were NOT secure

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