Bypass cut / copy / paste blocking on websites

Tuesday 26th January 2016

An increasing number of websites seem to be blocking the use of copy and paste.

They have their reasons for doing so, but they’re rarely good reasons. For example, they frequently justify banning c&p during signup, to ensure that when they ask you to enter a password twice, the purpose of entering it twice (to ensure you didn’t make a typo) isn’t subverted by the user blindly c&p’ing whatever they entered first time, typos and all. However, doing this also prevents pasting a strong, generated password from a password vault program like Keepass. It harms security to force everyone to use a password which is simple enough to type in.

Youtube probably bans pasting into comments in an effort to cut spam and blind trolling; but doing this also denies you the ability to edit and re-arrange your comment, or paste in a link to another site or even another Youtube video (which is stupid, because they do allow links, but force you to type them in, awkward for URLs like Youtube’s which contain a random string of upper and lowercase letters and numbers…)

Fortunately, bypassing these restrictions is easy, at least in Firefox:
In about:config, set dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false. That’s it.

Screen Shot 2016-01-26 at 13.00.15

Of course this will probably also break things that automatically copy to your clipboard when you press a button, but that’s no great hardship.

For Chrome and Chromium-based browsers there’s an add-on called “Don’t Fuck With Paste” – haven’t tried it but I agree with the sentiment 🙂

Terminal features wishlist: #1: Paste Intercept

Thursday 10th July 2008
A terminal program should have sufficient intelligence to recognise that, when (a) it is at a shell prompt, and (b) the user has just middle-clicked and sent hundreds of lines from the copy-paste buffer hurtling towards the shell prompt, the user may have made a mistake, the user’s mouse inadvertantly striking some object perhaps… and it should ask him whether he really wants to do that.

This was part of a much larger post which got killed by a bug in WordPress… “Are you sure you want to edit this post?” it asked. Yes, quoth I. And it was gone. 2 hours of scribbles, vanished, and even going back in the browser doesn’t recover it.

Related wishlist item: Anyone know of a little program that can sit on the desktop, probably always on top (so SMALL) and on all desks, which will show the current contents of the (Unix) copy-paste buffer, and provide a button to clear it? Even better if it can save a few of them too, even just 2 or 3. I like the Unix system. Left click and drag to select. Left click and right click to select by marking start and end points. Middle click to paste. It’s simple, it’s fast, it avoids faffing with menus. But there’s always a slight frisson of doubt which sets in as time passes between cut and paste. Currently the only way to find out is to paste somewhere. I’d like to just be able to look at the corner of the screen, see a tiny rendering of the contents, and know.