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Pastejacking

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51–60 of 246 posts

Re: Pastejacking

#52
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although what you propose sound plausible, the only instance of this I've seen is when adding copyright notices when you save the link to am image, or when they add this warning about not stealing the work and adding proper citation. The problem I see with this scenario is that not everyone is copy-pasting from the browser into a terminal. I for example copy things to my VM's text editor first, then run the command.…

The worst are the sites that add additional text when you copy eg something like a quote. Try to copy one from this site for example. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/albert_einstein....

Interesting; drag-and-drop bypasses that (allowing the selected text, and only the selected text, to be grabbed) but Copy using either keyboard or mouse is hijacked.

Re: Pastejacking

#53
post #28
post #9

There are many news sites that make it extremely hard to share their content on sites like HN or reddit because of these tricks. I wonder if they are actually losing traffic from it, or if their tactics work? I'm referring when you copy the text in the title of an article to try to paste it into the Title box on HN or reddit. But what you 'paste' is actually a huge paragraph about how great the news website is and ho…

I had to implement this kinda code when I worked for Demand Media and it certainly worked. Whats funny is you don't need any fancy new apis to make it work. We were doing some pretty basic tactics actually. Only real way to prevent it is disable javascript.

You should have refused

Re: Pastejacking

#54
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen sites that have pages where you're placed in a queue (for whatever reason) and if you leave the page you will be dropped from the queue, so it's nice to have something preventing you from accidentally leaving, but that's the only legitimate use I can think of.

Still, that functionality should be opt-in.

It's really not that bad. The big problem was historically the buttons were labeled "Cancel" or "Ok", and some browsers allowed pages to customize the button labels, making which you clicked very ambiguous. Browsers today just giving "Stay on this page" and "Leave this page" buttons aren't really much of a bother if you remember how bad it used to be.

Re: Pastejacking

#55
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to implement this kinda code when I worked for Demand Media and it certainly worked. Whats funny is you don't need any fancy new apis to make it work. We were doing some pretty basic tactics actually. Only real way to prevent it is disable javascript.

You should have refused

You shouldn't refuse. You should document the privacy impact and make sure everybody is aware of the privacy implications.

Re: Pastejacking

#56
post #28
post #9

There are many news sites that make it extremely hard to share their content on sites like HN or reddit because of these tricks. I wonder if they are actually losing traffic from it, or if their tactics work? I'm referring when you copy the text in the title of an article to try to paste it into the Title box on HN or reddit. But what you 'paste' is actually a huge paragraph about how great the news website is and ho…

I had to implement this kinda code when I worked for Demand Media and it certainly worked. Whats funny is you don't need any fancy new apis to make it work. We were doing some pretty basic tactics actually. Only real way to prevent it is disable javascript.

What do you mean by it worked? Did you have metrics supporting increased views that were tied to the paste highjacking?

Re: Pastejacking

#57
post #13

Why do browsers not require explicit user permission before allowing a site to perform clipboard manipulations? In a similar tashion to how the HTML5 geo-location API is opt-in?

This is fair. For me, this is a case where it is likely as narrowly annoying as helpful, and thus a no-win situation. Some sites I use are respnsible allowing you to copy an ip address on click, or a cryptocurrency wallet address on click, removing any extra whitespace and confirming a full address copy. This is quite important as perfectly copied addresses (which are basically massive strings of random text) ensure your money arrives properly, or is dispatched to the correct location.

However, sometimes I want to share a qoute I found online. I don't want a promo for the website inserted into my clipboard. For them, it must be a fine line that realization: user-hostility can be short term profitable but long term fatal.

Re: Pastejacking

#58
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a somewhat related note: why do browsers allow websites to prevent you from leaving via those annoying dialog boxes that ask you to click "cancel" or "leave"?

To be able to remind you about your unsaved changes before you leave the page. I personally find the benefits of websites doing that to be greater than the annoyment from websites abusing this functionality. (just an extra click when its being abused, but potentially saving hours of my time when used properly)

Sure, but I ant to at least be able to blacklist sites. Yes, Jira, I'm looking at you.

Re: Pastejacking

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a somewhat related note: why do browsers allow websites to prevent you from leaving via those annoying dialog boxes that ask you to click "cancel" or "leave"?

I have seen sites that have pages where you're placed in a queue (for whatever reason) and if you leave the page you will be dropped from the queue, so it's nice to have something preventing you from accidentally leaving, but that's the only legitimate use I can think of.

Websites can find better solutions if we kill this annoying feature. We have local storage in all browsers. Rather than prompting why not save it and recover when the user comes back. The users will always prefer this. It saves data even when the website crashes or the connectivity is lost and there is some important data on the page. Why have a feature that is abused more often than used especially there is no case where it is the only/best solution.

Re: Pastejacking

#60
post #36
post #7

This is why I always copy a command into TextEdit (or Notepad on Windows) first, and then re-copy the clean text before pasting into my terminal. While we are on the topic of copying and pasting. If the command downloads a script, make sure you download the script out-of-step via curl first, review its contents, and only then execute it. This avoids sites maliciously changing the script based on the User Agent.

Note that clever timing could get the "evil text" in your clipboard between checking in a text editor and pasting into the terminal. Hard to time correctly, but not impossible.

If you're taking that step, then after you paste into the clean room, you copy out of the clean room.
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