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Don't touch my clipboard

alexanderell.is

121–130 of 322 posts

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#121

You're giving sites permission to do this when you browse the web with browser that automatically executes whatever code it is sent. They're not forcing you, you're going there and you're asking for it and doing it yourself. There's an easy solution. Stop. Don't run JS by default.

OP is simply asking for a compromise, a better solution that yours. Instead of avoiding JS altogether, don’t give it access to things it should never have access / no business mucking around

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem specifically is that they are not the ASCII quote character. There is only one ASCII quote character, and that's the one used by programming languages. Any other quote or quote-like character is outside the ASCII range, and must therefore be Unicode (or another non-ASCII code page).

I know they're not compatible with programming languages that you may want to use. But that's the languages' problem. They're perfectly valid, standardised, characters.

No, iBooks inserting them around commands is the problem.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#123
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the clipboard on windows and in x-server work the same way. Programs can also read most files including files that contain private keys.

I really care about security and lament that most people don't, but maybe they've the right idea and I'm just wasting my time. There are simply too many holes to plug :/

How do you want the clipboard to work then?

To my mind, the whole point is to provide a way to move information within and between applications.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#124
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So trade those apps not working for immunity from JavaScript clipboard hijacking? I'd be 110% fine with that trade and nothing of value to me would be lost. Is it possible in Firefox? Anyone know?

Millions of people use applications with these kinds of features. A few more examples: the Scratch educational programming tool, website builders such as Webflow, diagram editors, image editors, etc. The list goes on and on. The browser is no longer just a document viewer... That ship has sailed, and overall it is a good thing. We can mitigate the risk of clipboard hijacking without burning down the house. By the way…

A decent workaround would be to have 2 clipboards. The regular untouched one and the special one. Then when you paste, apps which only take plain text will grab the regular one and apps which accept formatted copying will grab the special clipboard but also provide a "paste as plain text" so the user gets what they want every time.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#125
post #42

The wrongest thing about this, from my perspective, is that my browser fires off a js 'copy' event when I press control-c. There are times when I've found it helpful that a browser can copy text to my clipboard when I click a button, but I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it. Is there any way to configure my user agent (Firefox) not to do this? A hack is ok.

You can turn off JavaScript. This has the added benefit of disabling most tracking and advertising.

As well as disabling most of the internet. It makes more sense to turn off the bad apis individually and block known tracking domains.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#126
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So trade those apps not working for immunity from JavaScript clipboard hijacking? I'd be 110% fine with that trade and nothing of value to me would be lost. Is it possible in Firefox? Anyone know?

If you really don't mind it will break some websites, then you really can disable it in Firefox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22352929

Mind you that this breaks a LOT of things. Even stupid stuff like any textbox on Facebook will be broken.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#127

You're giving sites permission to do this when you browse the web with browser that automatically executes whatever code it is sent. They're not forcing you, you're going there and you're asking for it and doing it yourself. There's an easy solution. Stop. Don't run JS by default.

- This bathtub has a hole in it

- Just throw it and the baby away, problem solved

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#128
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't think of a single time when I want a site to react to my attempt to copy text off if it. I think it is needed for some complex web app to handle copying non-text content. Such as images in wysiwyg editor, Google Sheets/Slides...

So trade those apps not working for immunity from JavaScript clipboard hijacking? I'd be 110% fine with that trade and nothing of value to me would be lost. Is it possible in Firefox? Anyone know?

Maybe let users grant clipboard permissions, as they currently do for location, microphone, webcam or notifications?

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#129

Seriously... I want to know the business/legal logic behind adding copyright messages to the clipboard when copying. This has happened for a long time with news sites, Apple Books, etc. No user ever has ever wanted that. So what lawyers, where, ever demanded it, and why? Short snippets fall under fair use anyways ... and even if it didn't such a message doesn't prevent anything (you just delete it after pasting)... a…

Attorney here! (Not legal advice; consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.) I am skeptical that this is a copyright issue that raised an attorney's attention. It's far more likely IMO that this was a contractual obligation imposed by the publisher. I have no insider knowledge as to whether this is actually true, but it's quite probable that in exchange for allowing Apple Books to republish their content, the…

I have no insider knowledge

I don't either, with the added bonus of a complete lack of legal training but this clipboard thing has been a part of commercial e-reader apps for so long, if your (very plausible-sounding) theory is right, it's been boilerplate in such contracts for many years.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#130
post #107

I can read & write a language that I don't have a keyboard for (I use a standard US 101 key layout), so I work around this by cut & pasting single characters around to fix up the missing accent characters. Usually even a partially fixed word is enough for the spell checker to kick in and correct the rest, making this surprisingly fast. The thing that annoyed me recently is that if I cut & paste a single character in…

My bet is that there simply is no standard for anyone to adhere to at Google. It's a rather granular and specific artifact of UI, in a company not necessarily known for it's UI prowess or consistency, at least along that vector. I'm wondering if some of these issues could be resolved with some solid industry standards.

You’d think “when a user selects text and runs the copy command, that text should be written to the user’s clipboard” would be a solid enough industry standard.
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