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This is getting to be a real bugbear of mine, and from what I understand it's becoming more common.

A few of you might have heard of Tynt, a site that offers clipboard-hijacking services. With their API on your site, users that copy your content will either have the content they copy altered or a link to the website they sourced the information from will be placed at the end.

I object on a fundamental level to allowing anyone but myself access over my clipboard. It's a personal aspect of the computer and not one I plan on letting marketers into.

Previously, blocking clipboard hijacking was easy because Tynt were the only ones trying it, so setting up a hosts redirect for tcr.tynt.com killed it all without issue. Now, however, I see that other sites are hosting their own imitations, which do much the same thing.

Here's a JavaScript applet from one such site: http://www.lyricsmania.com/copy.js

You can test it out yourself by looking at any page of theirs: http://www.lyricsmania.com/watershed_lyrics_mark_hollis.html and copying any of the lyrics from there. They will add a link to their own site and a spam link beneath it.

Is it possible to instruct Google Chrome to block all scripts of this specific type? Is there a way to blanket deny pamphleteers access to my clipboard? I'd love to hear what anyone thinks.

I could use NoScript, but unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't contain any intelligent code to recognise JavaScript that's trying to hijack my clipboard, so it's not particularly useful here.

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  • techie007, this looks very similar to my query. thanks! my search didn't use the right terms to pick this question up so i appreciate it.
    – seagull
    Feb 7, 2014 at 17:57
  • @seagull Might I also suggest you try someonewhocares.org/hosts as the hosts file there is updated quite regularly and seems to block most hijacking sites such as Tynt. Feb 7, 2014 at 18:43

1 Answer 1

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I found an extension that blocks this BS conclusively.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-evil/epieehnpcepgfiildhdklacomihpoldk/related

It's called "kill evil".

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  • 1
    The link is broken (404). Jun 18, 2022 at 9:39
  • @PeterMortensen Looks like evil was stronger. Many such cases.
    – Vold
    May 2, 2023 at 19:42

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