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Don't touch my clipboard

alexanderell.is

61–70 of 322 posts

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#61
post #51

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like: “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)” Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. When you only copied: ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value) Note th…

What a surprise that Apple would do something user-hostile.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#62
post #18

I agree and share the frustration. A stock Apple application "Books" does something similar as well. When copying text -- using keyboard shortcut or the context menu rendered as soon as you lift your mouse (another tragedy) -- your clipboard will look something like the following (2 lines): “ ” Excerpt From: . “ .” Apple Books. That gets written to your clipboard; quotes and everything.

as does the kindle app. it's come in handy once for me (in a comment to a hn post, ironically), but usually it's a nuisance.

I loved it when I used Windows and OneNote (it would add metadata when I pasted to OneNote but not otherwise.)

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#63
IE (but not Edge, not surprisingly...) actually has a built-in feature which was probably specifically designed to target such things:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/855az.png

Selecting "prompt" will result in this:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/jvDUh.png

I set it to Prompt for trusted sites, and Disabled for all others.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#64
post #51

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like: “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)” Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. When you only copied: ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value) Note th…

Wonder if an author will rename themself sudo rm -rf / with the proper escape codes.

You my friend, are an evil, sadistic meglomaniac. I love it. Remind me not to make you mad.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#65
post #17

Really, the web just gets more and more vile towards users. Sure, highly technical folk are capable of working around this all -- but the vast majority of people do not have a browser that is _working for them_: - You have little to no control over what content you are seeing. Instead, it is chosen for you. - A large number of videos (not even including movies and shows) are geographically blocked. You cannot access…

I think browsers need to implement options to block most of the bad behaviors you describe, and bundle it all up into a "this site is an app" permission that is off by default. Pages that are fundamentally just documents dressed up with fancy navigation features don't need all those anti-features and it's the browser's duty to spare the user the annoyance, but Google Docs does need most of those APIs.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#66
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the wrongest thing is that this is a clear attack vector... make a site with helpful Linux shortcuts, then replace every copy with "curl malicious script and run it, plus a newline to make it run immediately"

> plus a newline to make it run immediately I already mentioned this in another comment, but everyone should enable bracket paste mode in their shell to defend against this. https://cirw.in/blog/bracketed-paste

Thanks for this. I had never heard of it before, but will definitely be playing around with it.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#67
post #51

It's not just a browser thing. Apple Books does this with their e-books, which is infuriating if you're working with a coding book and just want to copy-paste stuff into your editor/terminal. You get something like: “ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value)” Excerpt From: Bryan O’Sullivan, John Goerzen, and Donald Bruce Stewart. “Real World Haskell.” Apple Books. When you only copied: ghci> putStrLn (pretty 10 value) Note th…

My instinct is that this is for legal attribution purposes, i.e. a legal moat.

It sounds ridiculous, but in my experience, there are 1000 things that lawyers will identify as possible sources for legal trolling and this looks like that. Apple has a zillion dollars in the bank and they are sued daily. All it takes is for a judge who may nor not be knowledgable or a sufficiently grey area ... and you have a major problem.

So it could be risk mitigation: they are including the attribution in the copy so as to not be perceived as partisan to some kind of IP dissolution paradigm.

On the other hand, this could just be one of those wayward culty Apple kinds of things they think is 'good UI' when it's not.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#68
post #33

Most importantly, https://emdash.fan/ is the best emdash site on the internet.

My go-to site for copying special symbols is Wikipedia, which is, of course, well-behaved: Dashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash Diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic Precomposed Latin characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_precomposed_Latin_char... Currency symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_symbol Japanese typographic symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_typo…

MS Word will autocorrect two hyphens into either an en dash or an em dash based on what it believes you were trying to type.

So this: "em--dash" becomes this: "em—dash" while this: "en -- dash" becomes this: "en – dash"

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#69
I had to implement an in-house version of this way back on eHow before it was pretty easy. Cross browser issues made it pretty tricky - which is probably why a couple companies that just did this spawned from it.

It's all so silly and doesn't increase site visits in any meaningful way.

Sidenote: I'm glad javascript in browsers is a lot more standard so you don't have to get stupidly hacky.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#70
This isn't just the web, there's a fundamental leakiness to the Mac's clipboard. I was horrified to realise that apps were being alerted to what was on the clipboard when I copied a a public key from some website and MacGPG (or whichever GPG app it was, they change) popped its head up and told me (something like) "Hi, you've copied a public key, would you like to save it in your keyring?"

Does this mean that any currently running app (or maybe not even currently running, perhaps there's an event system) can see my clipboard?

My feeling about this is unprintable.

I started planning a clipboard app that doesn't allow this but I'm busy and I'd prefer this wasn't something I need to fix in the first place.

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