Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I was really thinking only of the
J-Playground. I don't use the call dll capabilities, but I do think it
would be wise to think about the ability of one to break out of the
sandbox. I know nothing about the one the J-Playground is using, but it is
worth considering.

On Fri, Jun 3, 2022, 2:31 AM Jan-Pieter Jacobs <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I think that Paul was referring to J in general, e.g. running on the
> desktop.
>
> I have to say this could be an actual concern, and surely for e.g.
> companies intending to adopt J for anything serious on computer inside a
> trusted network, especially since it involves downloading binaries from the
> J website that could be spoofed, or packages could be altered to download
> from elsewhere.
>
> Ubuntu and a lot of big FOSS projects like Libre office (ok, other order of
> magnitude, and more likely a target) sign their packages, so they can be
> verified upon install. I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to do the same
> with J installers (so the user can verify the download) and official
> packages (ideally automatically verified upon installation). I think this
> could be fairly easily accomplished with gpg.
>
> Perhaps J could also do a sanity check on its system tools (and perhaps
> some official packages like jqt and jhs) by verifying their checksums at
> startup.
>
> Just a thought
>
> Jan-Pieter
>
> On Fri, 3 Jun 2022, 00:23 Joe Bogner, <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I'm glad we're talking about this because there may be misconceptions of
> > how things work or perhaps I am not seeing the issue.
> >
> > Your example, when run, will only affect the specific browser tab that
> code
> > is run in. If that browser tab is reloaded, it starts with a fresh
> > temporary, in-memory file system. If a new browser tab is opened, it gets
> > its own temporary in-memory file system. In other words, it does no harm
> > except to that specific session.
> >
> > The J Playground does not touch the host operating system. It runs
> > sandboxed in the browser.
> >
> > The risk to me is that someone could write some code that taxes the CPU
> > (maybe mines cryptocurrency ;) ), but presumably a script like that will
> be
> > more easy to spot because the playground doesn't run code automatically.
> > Or, someone may write some code that blows up the memory of the tab,
> which
> > causes the browser to kill the tab. Browsers have gotten quite good at
> > keeping poor performing websites or operations from crushing the system.
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 5:56 PM Paul Jackson <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > At the moment there is an open door to anyone who knows, or cares to
> > learn
> > > about J.
> > >      'Testing' fwrite 'tmp/this.txt'
> > > At a minimum, we could make the directories write protected from the
> > > account running the interpreter.
> > >
> > >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
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For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

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