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JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

security.googleblog.com

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Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#51
post #44
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.8% of users don't know what javascript is.

Thus only 0.1% of users know what javascript is and it's okay with it. That is an interesting random stats, seems pretty realistic. I at least liked it.

Thats the wrong take on the stats. It means among the ones who know, half of them dont want it. This is more telling that looking at the 0.1%.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#53
post #37

To keep your account secure, turn on Javascript?? If anything is making your web browsing less secure, it's JS. I don't particularly care that Google isn't letting you sign in without JS, but the message is just plain wrong..

Passwords can be hashed directly client-side with javascript, which is way more secure than sending them clear on the wire, so i dont disagree with Google's stance here and dont understand the hate

Hashing passwords client side has no benefit if a site uses HTTPS.

If a site uses HTTP, then hashing the password client-side and sending it up to the server is equivalent to sending a clear text password. If an attacker can already read your traffic, what is stopping them from using your password's hash to log-in to your account?

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#54
post #9

This is coming right after the reCAPTCHA v3 announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331159 Sorry, you don't have enough Google Points to browse the web. Please enable JavaScript and install Google Chrome.

Recent new version of Google Mail flat out doesn't work to any usable standard in Firefox. Ten seconds to open a new 'compose mail' window. A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. The previous version worked great. Either the dev team has just given up on quality or they're intentionally goading me into installing Chrome. I'm not going to play that game -- at this point Thunderbird works better.

What version of Firefox are you running? You are either exaggerating greatly or have other issues with your system. I run the latest stable release of Firefox and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine. I’d be happy to upload a screen recording to verify.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#55
post #9

This is coming right after the reCAPTCHA v3 announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331159 Sorry, you don't have enough Google Points to browse the web. Please enable JavaScript and install Google Chrome.

Recent new version of Google Mail flat out doesn't work to any usable standard in Firefox. Ten seconds to open a new 'compose mail' window. A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. The previous version worked great. Either the dev team has just given up on quality or they're intentionally goading me into installing Chrome. I'm not going to play that game -- at this point Thunderbird works better.

Firefox on mobile or PC? I haven't experienced that on PC.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#57
post #17

Chrome team members have said that preventing modern web browsers from leaking enough entropy to uniquely identify users across sessions (fingerprinting) is impractical with all of the features that the modern web provides. This sentiment has probably lead to some at Google to think that it is justifiable impose pervasive tracking and surveillance technologies as a condition for using Google services. Look at the new…

Do you have a better solution for differentiating yourself as an actual user from a robot spammer?

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#58
post #9

This is coming right after the reCAPTCHA v3 announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18331159 Sorry, you don't have enough Google Points to browse the web. Please enable JavaScript and install Google Chrome.

Recent new version of Google Mail flat out doesn't work to any usable standard in Firefox. Ten seconds to open a new 'compose mail' window. A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing. The previous version worked great. Either the dev team has just given up on quality or they're intentionally goading me into installing Chrome. I'm not going to play that game -- at this point Thunderbird works better.

Switching email providers is reasonably painless, fwiw. Set up forwarding, migrate mail when you can.

Even better if you set up the majority of your non-security-essential mail to be at your own domain, hosted by Fastmail/etc. Then you can easily change your email provider and your contacts don't even care. I've yet to implement this is in my own life, I just switched to fast mail - so I can't speak from personal experience on the domain portion of it.

NOTE: I mentioned non-security-essential email in reference to things like, your bank login or things that could threaten your life essentials. I say this because theoretically (and has happened before), using your own domain increases the attack surface area. My personal plan is to setup custom domain email with Fastmail, but still use the plain me@fastmail.com for my security focused emails. The majority of my email will still be based on my custom domain for easy portability, but I plan to avoid that for my bank, for example... assuming fast mail lets me.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#59

ITT: people dramatically under-estimating the risk to their accounts from credential stuffing and dramatically over-estimating their security benefits from not running JS. They're probably right that not running JS is privacy accretive, but only if you consider their individual privacy, and not the net increase in privacy for all users by being able to defend accounts against cred stuffing using JS. The privacy loss…

Even when I ran noscript Google domains were allowed. It's extra step for a small number of technical users.

Re: JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is sending passwords in cleartext on the wire?

Indeed. And: who is hashing passwords on the client? As this would require either not using a salted hash, or sharing the server's salt with the client, in order to obtain identical hash values for comparison. In either case that system's entire password inventory would be a lot more vulnerable. TLDR don't do that, send passwords over SSL and use a good password hashing algorithm on the server like BCrypt.

Yep. Proper password hashing requires per-credential salt, pepper (for all credentials) and a strong algorithm (IV, iterations etc.) Revealing all those information is a leak and arguably making client side hashing less secure (by giving away a lot of parameters for attackers to attack)
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