Posted by enos_feedler 1 day ago
by any chance anyone knows if users clicks can be captured for a website/tab/iframe for screen recording. i know i can record screen but i am wondering if this metadata can be collected.
For your own implementation, document-level event listeners work, though cross-origin iframes are off-limits due to same-origin policy.
Sadly not to my knowledge.
I'm on a multi-year quest to answer that question!
The best I've found is running Python code inside Pyodide in WASM in Node.js or Deno accessed from Python via a subprocess, which is a wildly convoluted way to go but does appear to work! https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/pyodide-sandbox
Here's a related recent experimental library which does something similar but with JavaScript rather than Python as the unsafe language, again via Deno in a subprocess: https://github.com/simonw/denobox
I've also experimented with using wasmtime instead of Deno: https://til.simonwillison.net/webassembly/python-in-a-wasm-s...
* Multithreaded support
* Calling subprocesses
* Signals
* Full networking support
* Support for greenlets (say hi to SQLAlchemy!) :)
Also the double iframe technique is important for preventing exfiltration through navigation, but you have to make sure you don't allow top navigation. The outer iframe will prevent the inner iframe from loading something outside of the frame-src origins. This could mean restricting it to only a server which would allow sending it to the server, but if it's your server or a server you trust that might be OK. Or it could mean srcdoc and/or data urls for local-only navigation.
I find the WebAssembly route a lot more likely to be able to produce true sandboxen.
A large part of the web is awful because of all the things browsers must do that the operating system should already be doing.
We have all tolerated stagnant operating systems for too long.
Plan 9's inherent per-process namespacing has made me angry at the people behind Windows, MacOS, and Linux. If something is a security feature and it's not an inherent part of how applications run, then you have to opt in, and that's not really good enough anymore. Security should be the default. It should be inherent, difficult to turn off for a layman, and it should be provided by the operating system. That's what the operating system is for: to run your programs securely.
Can you believe that if you download a calculator app it can delete your $HOME? What kind of idiot designed these systems?
The problems discussed by both Simon and Paul where the browser can absolutely trash any directory you give it is perhaps the paradigmatic example where git worktree is useful.
Because you can check out the branch for the browser/AI agent into a worktree, and the only file there that halfway matters is the single file in .git which explains where the worktree comes from.
It's really easy to fix that file up if it gets trashed, and it's really easy to use git to see exactly what the AI did.