Rick Scott

I admit, I'm not super-knowledgeable about security. I know some of the fundamentals, but not a great deal beyond that.

Still, in my early days on the 'net I got the distinct impression that allowing random people to execute arbitrary code on your computer is bad. I mean, that's somebody else using your computer to do stuff without your knowledge or consent, right? That's why attacks like this really, really make me shake my head (NSFW, offensive, turn off javascript before following):

hxxp://encyclopediadramatica.com/Firefox_XPS_IRC_Attack 

Despite all this, somehow today's ordinary browsing experience consists of downloading pages full of arbitrary javascript written by any random person who controls a website, then blithely running them on your machine.

I don't get it. Where did we go wrong?

(PS. Firefox users: NoScript is your friend. =)