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The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites (sansec.io)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The polyfill.js is a popular open source library to support older browsers. 100K+ sites embed it using the cdn.polyfill.io domain. Notable users are JSTOR, Intuit and World Economic Forum. However, in February this year, a Chinese company bought the domain and the Github account. Since then, this domain was caught injecting malware on mobile devices via any site that embeds cdn.polyfill.io. Any complaints were quickly removed (archive here) from the Github repository.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I invite everybody to find out how everything "mostly" works if you disable "most of" javascript – also have fun deciding which parts to enable because you think they're trustworthy

Having done this for many many years, I can tell you: if you allow the site scripts (which is an acknowledgement of js at least), and a few “big” ones like ajax.google.com, jquery.com, and ytimg.com, etc., you then find a smaller subset of annoying-but-necessary-for-individual-websites that you can enable as needed or just add them as trusted if you’re into that kind of thing.

After that you have the utter garbage sites with 30 scripts of tracking data-sucking bullshit (CNN, looking at you) and for those sites I have said “Thou shalt bite my shiny metal ass” and i just don’t go there.

It’s a concession to js, yes, but it’s also not free rein to trample all over the surfing experience. Totally worth the time to work out.