Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement - Samuel Johnson
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Mozilla outs automatic browser audio and video recording
BROWSER DEVELOPER Mozilla has unveiled a plugin that allows developers to access local audio and video recording capabilities by invoking a few lines Javascript.
The Rainbow add-on generates files for video and audio data in either Theora or Vorbis formats respectively, storing them in an Ogg container. The files are accessible through the document object model (DOM) via the HTML5 file API, which can then be used to upload the files onto a server.
Mozilla provides sample code to show how simple the whole process is, and coming in at less than 30 lines, it's hard to argue against the outfit's claims.
Rather curiously, the add-on only works with nightly builds of Firefox for Mac OS X at the moment, though Mozilla says it is working hard to bring Rainbow over to Windows and Linux along with 64-bit support. There are other important aspects of Rainbow's development that have yet to be implemented, with Mozilla saying it is planning to work on implementing a "robust permissions mechanism", support VP8 encoding and allow live streaming of feeds.
Mozilla has released the source code for Rainbow, encouraging contributions. The idea of a system that provides seamless audio and video content generation within the browser is extremely useful for social notworking and media sharing websites.
However, the idea of browsers being able to record audio and video by some simple Javascript commands does lead to privacy concerns. One has to hope that any permissions mechanisms Mozilla and others come up with will be able to successfully prevent any malicious use.
If so, Rainbow could be yet another step in the web browser's relentless takeover of desktop applications' functions, including all those that their designers haven't even thought of yet. µ
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Hey Mozilla, rather than adding worthless security hazard "features" to your bloated browser, why don't you try fixing some of the memory bugs that have plagued it since version 3.0? We don't need Javascript extensions that make it work like Flash; we need a browser that doesn't eat up 800 MB of RAM that it can't free until the program is completely exited.
In the same line of thought, Google needs to get its ass in gear and create a decent extensions API so I can jump ship to Chrome permanently. Only Mozilla's extensions are keeping people from jumping ship, not goofy Javascript video and audio recording or other outright stupid proposed features.
so they have a java code (malware) that if you go to a web page that runs the script they could pull a live audio and video feed from your computer, likely without you even knowing it?
Maybe they don't care about your Cam, can they stream your desktop to themselves, even better than a key logger for the theives out there.
Who would have thought, another reason to hate java,, do they ever end?
And in america and many other places you'd hope it also prevents so called 'legal' use by your friendly government agents, or school boards..