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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

That guy managed to instantly go from slightly above zero respect to negative, when i copy-pasted stuff and noticed that his site saw fit to add spam onto that in the buffer.

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So you copied his content and were mad that he included text which noted you copied his content?

Ctrl+C means copy the text, with optional formatting. It doesn't mean "run a script", and this little trick implies two things: first, that the author is going to assume that anyone who copies text is trying to steal the content without attribution; secondly, that having been corrected in your naughty ways, you'll blithely accept the link he's pasted in there.

It's a web faux-pas, the equivalent of having your whole site in Flash, or trying to disable right-click for fear that someone might steal your precious, precious content.

"his content"

It's not yours. He can do what he wants with it.

Designing your website to hijack basic system functions is bullshit, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to copy text from an article (quoting it for discussion on a Hacker News thread is the first one that comes to mind).

Unfortunately, cramming spam into copied text seems to be getting more popular, and rudeness aside it's a potential security risk (i.e. if an unsuspecting help-seeker copy-pastes a command line and it turns into a completely different command line in the buffer). Is there a plugin yet to disable copy-buffer spam specifically, or would I need to disable JavaScript completely?

It's his content. He can make as easy or difficult to copy as he wants. It isn't spam, it's attribution. Your self entitled comment really worries me.

It appears that that is indeed what Mithaldu said. Well done, A+ for reading comprehension.

To be fair: I am less concerned about the adding of text, but the fact that it also adds a newline.

I copied it with the intent of putting quotes around it and adding the link to the end of it. However as is, i had to copy it into an editor and mangle it there, before posting it in chat.

"his content" It's not yours. He can do what he wants with it. The newline was there in the code. His code.

Sure, he can do what he wants to do with it.

That doesn't mean that it isn't very disrespectful behavior to his audience. :)

Only because one can do something doesn't mean one should.

Well, it's not from a script in his page, because it does not work with me. It must be from a 3rd party script, but there are so many of them that I'm simply not curious enough to discover wich.

Anyway, that blog is hosted on a 3rd party service, owned by an ad company. It's not that easy to blame him for what the service does. (Does Mish even know that blogger inserts ads there?)

It is from a script in his page:

http://i.po.st/share/script/post-widget.js

I've also never seen that on another blogspot blog, so while they might've added more stuff, i don't think it's that.

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