A combination of the Java class loader, the byte-code verifier, and the language design itself assures that an applet can't just directly poke into memory and disable the security checks. Wallach's team has also come up with a neat way to use digital signatures that allows these fine-grained security decisions to be made automatically. Microsoft's ActiveX and Authenticode technologies can't ever provide the sort of control that's going to be in Netscape Navigator 4.0, because once an ActiveX control is running, it has free run of your Windows 95-based computer. And hopefully, it will be another reason to avoid the deadly dangers of ActiveX. Talk back to Simson Garfinkel in his column's Threads . Illustration by Dave Plunkert Join the HotWired Network, it's free .
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