Must read this!
Daring Fireball
Friday, 28 May 2010
Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs. What happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text. So, for example, if I were using this “service” here on Daring Fireball, and you selected the first sentence of this article, copied it, then switched to another app to paste the text you just copied, instead of pasting just the sentence you selected and intended to copy, you’d instead get:
Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs.
Read more: http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks/#ixzz0oyLiD4Qh
I.e., three blank lines followed by “Read more:”, then the URL from which the text was copied, then an identifying hash code used for tracking purposes.
Among the sites where I’ve seen this in use are TechCrunch (example) and The New Yorker (example). The JavaScript tomfoolery happens with most text copied from the site — whether you’re copying the entire article, a paragraph, or a sentence.
Read full article — includes code to block this insane intrusive idiocy.
Phi Beta Iota: Although “corruption” can certainly include “idiocy” we felt it appropriate to recognize Tynt — and the morons that let them corrupt web sites — with a special new category — Idiocy. Tip of the Hat to Mario Profaca for flagging, and Daring Fireball for putting into words — and providing code solutions –a public service.
