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Don't touch my clipboard

alexanderell.is

211–220 of 322 posts

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched back to Chrome on mobile because I NEED the ability to blacklist JavaScript from abusive sites. Hacker News links, in particular, are infuriating without it. I haven't found a way to do this in any of the Firefox versions available for Android. My block list is mostly well known news sites.

Ublock origin works on mobile, and you can reuse your settings from desktop.

uBlock Origin even works on Firefox Preview Nightly, which I'm really loving. Way faster than normal Firefox on my old Nexus 6. Makes the phone feel several years younger.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#212
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Currently, it's a relatively small and spammy portion of it.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#213
post #188
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Protip: in Safari you can assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle javascript (Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts -> [+] -> Application: "Safari" Menu Title: "Disable JavaScript" Shortcut: "Cmd+Shift+J". >90% of websites immediately become massively more pleasant and you can quickly toggle it on when actually needed. For mobile devices, easiest way is to use two different browsers (one with JS disabled…

I presume this toggle applies to all windows and tabs. As an example, if some page uses a meta refresh tag to periodically refresh it and also has JS (which wasn’t loaded before), the JS would get loaded at a future point when it’s enabled through this option (though it may be for some other tab in focus that the user enabled it for)?

A per tab setting that remembers the JS enabled state would be very useful, with the default being JS disabled.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#214
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve recently been experimenting with having JS off by default on Brave. Many sites that I don’t regularly use or have an account/relationship with are much more pleasant without JS. There may be some visual breakage in some cases, but I’m there for the main content, which is mostly fine.

I had experimented with NoScript long ago, but found it a bit more cumbersome at that point because (then, before the uBlock days) I couldn’t really judge which scripts were necessary and which weren’t. I’m going to try it again.

One big plus with disabling JS is that all those ad blocker blockers and other annoying popups just don’t even appear, and that adds to a better experience.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#215
post #213
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protip: in Safari you can assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle javascript (Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts -> [+] -> Application: "Safari" Menu Title: "Disable JavaScript" Shortcut: "Cmd+Shift+J". >90% of websites immediately become massively more pleasant and you can quickly toggle it on when actually needed. For mobile devices, easiest way is to use two different browsers (one with JS disabled…

I presume this toggle applies to all windows and tabs. As an example, if some page uses a meta refresh tag to periodically refresh it and also has JS (which wasn’t loaded before), the JS would get loaded at a future point when it’s enabled through this option (though it may be for some other tab in focus that the user enabled it for)? A per tab setting that remembers the JS enabled state would be very useful, with th…

Yeah, it's global, and unfortunately I believe that Apple has gimped extensions so something like NoScript is no longer possible. If you need granularity or whitelisting of domains, I'm afraid you need another browser. On the glass half full side, being a global switch means it's less mental overhead – you have a single additional modal bit instead of O(tabs).

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#216

What's with ultra-grey font colors? It's not 2010 anymore, give your text some contrast ffs, you are killing my eyes

Sorry about that. I had been using some default styles that came with the Hugo theme I'm using, but I absolutely see what you mean. Updated text throughout the site to have better contrast. Hope that helps!

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#217

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 curr…

Yes, Mac apps have access to the clipboard; that's why they can paste. Is Windows or Linux different? Honest question. Please do not give Apple ideas for a "App would like to access your clipboard" dialog.

What's wrong with the system being push instead of pull?

On this key combination (default cmd+V), copy the data stored in this clipboard to the currently active app's own paste buffer, which will then handle inserting the data

vs

All apps can read and write to the clipboard at all times

World readable and writable files that often carry sensitive information sounds like a stupid idea to me.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#218
post #175
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the next step when you face this problem is doing a search-replace of the quotes to remove them. ASCII quotes are on your keyboard, so you can actually type the command to remove them. Unicode quotes probably aren't, so it's extra annoying to remove them, and they're not even the same character for start and end so you have to do it twice. The time spent for removal is then vastly higher than with ASCII quote…

PowerShell acknowledged smart quotes and dashes in its language design and allows proper quotes interchangeably with ASCII straight quotes. I always found that an interesting design choice, although I'm not sure how useful it actually is to allow people to copy/paste code from dubious web pages. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so why bother making it harder?

This is going down a rabbit hole. “This” is an English quote, whereas „this“ is a German quote; note that the open quote character in the English quote is equal to the close quote character in the German quote.

Then there is a less-often used style of quoting, similar to the French style, but: «this» is the French quote, whereas »this« is the German version. Yes, the open and close quotes are swapped.

I applaud the idea, but just want to point out that there are dragons lurking in the shadows.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds like you're conflating two orthogonal concepts: multiple named clipboard locations, and multiple data types on one clipboard. Both already exist, and are how clipboards on major platforms have worked for decades.

The Javascript interface isn't aware of these distinctions, though I'm not sure I want it to. Web apps like this that abuse one plain text clipboard will abuse multiple richly typed clipboards, too.

Re: Don't touch my clipboard

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true only of distributions that alias rm with rm -i. Now, almost 20 years ago only RedHat did it. And it felt wrong to me :-/

Modern versions of rm require you to pass --no-preserve-root. According to Wikipedia [1] this has been the default (in upstream) since 2006. Of course it took distros some time to actually update to the GNU utils 6.4 (especially long-term support systems like CentOS) but it's been a decade since the change should've been implemented everywhere. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm_%28Unix%29#Protection_of_th...

Isn't that only a GNU and FreeBSD thing? I think other Unixes will still let you rm -rf /.

On FreeBSD you can do

    sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem
and it will do exactly that, write random crap into your memory without any sort of safeguard, causing a spectacular crash and a console that looks like it's having a seizure. Linux won't let you do that unless it's been compiled with a flag to enable full access to /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
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