On Saturday, March 21, during the LibrePlanet conference, FSF president Richard Stallman announced a plan of action for addressing the problem of non-free Javascript, Flash and Silverlight programs. He highlighted the danger posed to user freedom by the way these nontrivial programs are silently run in browsers with no opportunity for users to view or modify unobfuscated source code.

You may be running non-free programs on your computer every day without realizing it—through your web browser.

In the free software community, the idea that non-free programs mistreat their users is familiar. Some of us refuse entirely to install proprietary software, and many others consider non-freedom a strike against the program. Many users are aware that this issue applies to the plug-ins that browsers offer to install, since they can be free or non-free.

But browsers run other non-free programs which they don't ask you about or even tell you about—programs that web pages contain or link to.

Read the full article online.

Help spring the Javascript Trap -- Join the efforts of free software activists and programmers to address this threat to user freedom.