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koolalatoday at 11:39 AM1 replyview on HN

Who said anything about authentication? The only freedom I want is being able to wget content no differently than from a terminal. You need a modded custom browser to do that.


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9devtoday at 1:00 PM

> Who said anything about authentication?

That's the thing. If you're logged in to good.com (with a session cookie), then go to evil.com and it has an AJAX call to good.com, it'll carry your cookie. Thus - authentication. Suddenly evil.com can remote control good.com. (at least it used to be this way at the time we got CORS; the situation has changed a bit with newer web platform features like SameSite cookie params.)

> The only freedom I want is being able to wget content no differently than from a terminal.

I see your point, I really do. But the Venn diagram overlap of "sites that need to download arbitrary websites", "sites that need to only fetch content client-side in the browser, not via their backend", and "sites that do this for non-nefarious purposes" is infinitesimally small. I'm pretty sure your use case is missing at least one of these three criteria.

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