Incredible information (ebay-paypal)

I don't do ebay very much as of late, but have thought about adding a personal account for the sending and receiving of monies.  Here is what I found out on the Community bullentin board:

The parties who do this aren't individuals, as such . . . they're organized crime groups who collaborate online to hijack accounts, scam people, hack computers, and commit other Internet crimes.

If you routinely go online with JavaScript enabled, there's a chance that you could get 'nailed' by a malicious script which can steal information from your computer or can monitor what you do on your computer. These malicious JavaScripts may not be noticed by Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware products because they're capable of changing their coding each time they load into our computer's memory. Since they don't write anything to our hard drive, most Security software won't routinely find them, during a scan. There would be nothing to find - these scripts can do their dirty work strictly from memory.

In Internet Explorer, versions 6 and 7, JavaScript is controlled by the 'Active Scripting' setting. In most other browsers, there's a separate control for ENabling or DISabling JavaScript. Do NOT confuse JavaScript with Java. These two items are very different, and the controls for one do NOT work with the other.

Java is a programming language, built by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s.
JavaScript is a scripting language, developed originally by Netscape, later in the 1990s.

Small Java programs, called 'applets', run from the server to which we're connected . . . IF . . . we've downloaded and installed the Java Runtime Environment software from Sun -- which allows our computers to 'read' the applets -- and turned Java ON . . . AND . . . IF . . . that server has a Java applet that it wants us to interact with.
JavaScript runs solely thru our browser and is readily interpreted by all modern browsers, unless we've turned OFF JavaScripting (aka 'Active Scripting'). All we need to run JavaScript is a browser -- any browser.

Java is most commonly used online for small programs (those 'applets'), where a fair amount of user interaction is necessary. It's also a very powerful programming language that can be used to create incredibly complex programs which don't require the Internet, at all.

JavaScript is primarily used to automate routine online tasks, and it's easily inserted into the HTML coding in web pages. It's great for this purpose . . . and malicious hackers use some intensely creative JavaScripting to give them access to our computers. Most JavaScripts are written to run unseen and totally un-noticed, by users. Most Security software can miss a rather high percentage of malicious JavaScripts because they're often 'one-of-a-kind' scripts. Some JavaScripts can also modify themselves, in that they change their own coding each time they run, and -- as a result -- the JavaScript won't be recognized as being malicious.

Problems with JavaScript can arise, if we've turned it OFF thru our browser controls, in that many websites do not function properly