Bad Netizenship - Video Edition

Back in the day when I was working primarily in the plumbing (layers 1-3), my peers and I singled out customers/providers as "bad netizens" who would do a variety of either lazy or malicious things with their routing tables, filters, dns caching, etc. These people drove me crazy. Changing lenses to a consumer angle, I visit a lot of websites, for work and play. And I love a good video. Who doesn't like learning that bullfrogs are every bit the hunter an aligator is? So does most of the internet-enabled world as evidenced by some of the crazy stats posted over on this Digiday blog entry. But what I don't love, in fact, what I loathe with the heat of a thousand suns, is  video auto-play. Irony of ironies, that stats blog I just linked is a violator to the point I'm making here! Here's the deal. I have four and half kids (sweet neighbor girl always over at the house.) I get plenty of in-your-face overwhelming drama every day. I don't need your video blaring in my face adding to the crazy.

So I say all that to say .. there's help for me and you. Noscript is a Firefox add-on that takes the pain of video autoplay. And it does that by default. Woot! But it also does a lot more with regards to security, including XSS and clickjacking protection, which Joe blogged about previously. So do yourself a favor and install Noscript. Today!