JavaScript User Prohibitions Are Like Content DRM, But Even Less Effective (teleread.com) 188
Robotech_Master writes: It always puzzles me whenever I run across a post somewhere that uses JavaScript to try to prevent me from copying and pasting text, or even viewing the source. These measures are simple enough to bypass just by disabling JavaScript in my browser. It seems like these measures are very similar to the DRM publishers insist on slapping onto e-books and movie discs—easy to defeat, but they just keep throwing them on anyway because they might inconvenience a few people.
Ah, but it's the effort to deter that counts. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody expects a "No Trespassing" sign to stop anybody from really doing anything they shouldn't, heck, you shouldn't expect your home locks to stop a burglar, and no, nobody thinks a "No Guns allowed" sign stops anybody with firearms.
But once you say "Stop, don't do it" then anybody making the effort to continue, no matter how trivial, has made an intentional action on their part.
Re:Ah, but it's the effort to deter that counts. (Score:5, Insightful)
You might have been right if the DRM applied aligns 100% with legal boundaries. That is, allow what's legal and prevent illegal uses. And keeps doing so as circumstances / place / time changes.
But in practice, it never does. DRM on an e-book that prevents copying period, also prevents copying small snippets to use as quote. Which is perfectly legal - see "fair use".
Unlike author claims, the DRM on Blu-rays is far from broken. If it were, playing them on open source operating systems like Linux would be as easy as playing DVD's on there. But that's not the case. There's databases of per-disk decoding keys floating around. There's libraries that emulate some sort of virtual machine that's built into 'authorised' playback devices. There's other libraries that cut through parts of the DRM bullshit, or attempt to streamline the process.
But all of these are kludges, there's no 100% guarantee that a random Blu-ray will play (using open source, at the moment), and it's a lot of hassle for users who are just trying to play discs they legally purchased. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the DRM on Blu-rays will be as irrelevant as that on DVD's, but we're not there yet and in any case it doesn't change the annoyance factor one bit.
What's more: these issues mostly bother legal users, those who download movies illegally couldn't care less. But the DRM will still be in place as long as the discs itself. Regardless of legalities.
There's countless examples like that. The technical measures are practically never capable of following legal developments, nor do they adapt to local jurisdiction. Or have a built-in kill switch that 'frees' a product when legal restrictions end. In my personal opinion: DRM simply lowers the value of products that it's applied to, PERIOD. Sometimes to the point of making those products worthless. Some DRM is just more annoying or difficult to circumvent than others.
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In my personal opinion: DRM simply lowers the value of products that it's applied to, PERIOD. Sometimes to the point of making those products worthless.
This is the reason I don't buy Blu Ray disks, ever, but continue to buy DVD's. The first thing I do with DVD's I buy is to extract them to my home media server, to keep the original disk safe and to be able to watch the movie from any computer in my house. Blu Ray makes this so painful that I just won't buy any. That type of access restriction lowers the value of Blu Ray to zero.
I totally get why illegal movie downloaders claim that the movie studios are the biggest cause of illegal movie downloading.
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But in practice, it never does. DRM on an e-book that prevents copying period, also prevents copying small snippets to use as quote. Which is perfectly legal - see "fair use".
I'm sorry to hear that your fingers are broken and you can't type up your paper / article / whatever. By the way, how did you manage to write the rest of the words, including the proper citations of the text you wanted to copy? And hoooo boy, what if you wanted something from a physical book? Scan and OCR or just get lazy and take a photo of the page?
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In the US, bypassing DRM is illegal. Not many other places. Of course, the US reserves the right to try any world citizen in absence for infractions not committed on US soil, so there's that...
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America has successfully been pushing for other countries to make breaking DRM illegal. Here in Canada the US claimed we were worse then China for pirating and pressured the government to make breaking any DRM (excepting VHS tapes) illegal, not even the exceptions you guys get. All the trade treaties in the pipeline also include various ways to make IP stronger, copyrights longer and other BS.
American companies are well served by their government, much better then the voters/taxpayers.
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While I generally agree with what you are saying, if you are able to break the DRM by yourself without recourse to a cracking tool made by someone else (such as the previously mentioned turning off javascript and then copying from a website) then that is defensible. I don't recall the court and don't have a citation handy, but that was the criteria employed by a judge in deciding a case.
In other words, using a library to crack dvd encryption would be a violation of the DMCA, but if you independently wrote a
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just because something blocks you from accessing a context menu doesn't mean that you're not allowed to press save as.
besides, for all your examples you would notice if someone did that.
furthermore, are you really so stupid that you think people don't generally leave their guns at home when boarding a flight because there's signs(rules) saying so? wtf man, wtf. how would you know if a bar banned open carry if they did not post a sign. those signs, they stop a plenty of people from doing things other people
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A sign is a notification...
A notification on a website could be placed within the text of the site itself, using javascript is a very poor attempt to do more than just post a sign...
It's more akin to an extremely low fence.
The worst part is that whoever requests stuff like this be added generally believe it's actually effective, but all it does is serve to irritate users.
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But this also prevents those that may just want to make a quote and then link to the full story at the site.
The practice to think that all such actions are evil intended is sick.
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Trivial to bypass (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a photographer, and I have no problem sharing this:
If you want to get around the image obfuscation used by most photo sharing sites and more and more news sites, open up firefox, and go to view -> page style -> no style. That usually gives you the actual image displayed somewhere in the resulting page. No plugins needed.
If you want to better ensure your name stays with an image, watermark it, and add meta-data. Depending on how annoying the watermark is, someone could take the time to paint it out, and meta data is trivial to strip. As the saying goes, if you can see it, you can take it. If you're that worried about it, don't show it to anyone.
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I've used DigiMarc for years as a way to invisibly watermark images. The only time I've had to use this was someone linking to images on my website, using my bandwidth. I changed the pics the links he pointed to, to random 4chan memes. He then threatened to sue, and claimed ownership of my images. Well, a DMCA takedown notice sent to his ISP and the ISP above him did the job. I then change my web code to only let people with a Referer header from my site view the pictures (primitive, but deters stuff),
Re:Trivial to bypass (Score:4, Interesting)
I like Flickr's attempt at blocking the image. If I want to download an image in Chrome I normally right click the image and hit S on the keyboard. Then save it somewhere. If a Flickr image is marked as download disabled and I right click an image in Chrome and click S I still get given a familiar save as dialogue. Except this time since Chrome doesn't think I clicked on an image it downloads the page. .... with the image at every available resolution. Just sorting the resulting folder by size gives the image.
This isn't even a wilful bypass, it's an accidental bypass.
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Yeah there's always a way but you missed my point, the point was that their copyright prevention system is so useless that the same shortcut key combination that used to download images still downloads the images (just some HTML and CSS files as well).
This is less than useless. This is useless to the point where someone doesn't even understand computers will still download pictures but may not even realise what's going on. It's everything I've come to expect from the yahoos at Yahoo.
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>If you're that worried about it, don't show it to anyone.
This. "Three men can keep a secret if two are dead."
Once you release something in the wild, any illusion of control over it exists on a voluntary basis. If you want moral (but not logistical) claim over it, put it behind conditional agreement. You don't see corporates protect their trade secrets with propaganda posters - you have people sign a fucking NDA and you STILL maintain a need-to-know over sensitives that you keep relatively quarantined.
Because information is a contagion, not a possession.
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I bet it's pretty ugly in terms of battery life/CPU on mobile
It is likely to be nearly free, because the 2d video hardware handles moving the squares around. From a CPU perspective it is just re-ordering an array and making a few API calls to the video driver. The standard fiddling of the DOM that modern websites do with JS is way worse.
I always just assume that the photographer doesn't want the unwashed masses to see their work, so I oblige them and find content that wants to be Free. Content wants to be Free, but not all content. Humans want to be Free, but not all
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Looks like the opposite of sprites, so it's probably called pepsi
Please don't jump all over Anne R Allen's blog... (Score:3, Insightful)
... telling her how dumb this is. She knows, she didn't put those wheels into motion herself, and she sounds pretty gutted and apologetic.
Play nice.
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That's why I added the update right at the top explaining about that before the story even got picked up on Slashdot.
As a non anon coward (Score:2)
Yeah. Scripting - it's shut off unless needed. For me to enable any scripting I really do have to want the cheese.
I'd rather find another site before any scripting is enabled in my browsers - and to accentuate my level of paranoia - I stopped loading Adobe stuff 5 years ago.
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Yeah. Scripting - it's shut off unless needed. For me to enable any scripting I really do have to want the cheese.
Please enable javascript to see the big boobs then, please download and install our special plugin to see everything...
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Duh, I know this but some like to Go for the eyes Boobs! GO FOR THE EYES! before they play with the in house ones.
Re: As a non anon coward (Score:2)
Don't forget to turn off cookies too.
"Few"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you underestimate how many people this sort of thing stops. Yeah, it won't stop most techheads, but the inconvenience is enough to stop most people. Hell, most people don't even know you can turn off javascript. Most people don't even know what javascript is.
That's sufficient for their purposes, really. They can't stop everyone, no system is perfect, its enough for them to minimize it.
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I read the article, and it turns out it isn't mainly about how easy it is to bypass JavaScript restrictions. That's a part of it, and maybe he needs to be reminded of the majority's computer competence. But that's not the gist.
It wasn't so much, "Ha ha, watch me bypass your flimsy JavaScript." It was more, "Oh the senseless inconvenience you put me and others through," and "This copy-blocking clashes with the Internet like a plaid shirt and checkered pants". A few of his points:
1. If you don't want your stu
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Oh, and don't forget:
5. The way the DMCA is written it doesn't matter how pathetic or useless the lock is, merely that someone tried to digitally protect it.
So, don't forget that defeating this flimsy javascript, is (according to a law bought and paid for by the copyright cartel) just the same as defeating crypto or breaking a physical lock.
And those people don't recognize any of your points like how this incompatible with the intertubes. They bought a law which doesn't give a crap about any of that. Jus
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Actually there is a court tested exception where if you crack the "lock" yourself it is okay. It is using someone else's tool that will get you into trouble. The trivial case of the web-browser based "protection" gives a practical application of this.
Now, its a defense not immunity so it doesn't protect against a lawsuit. However, you shouldn't run afoul of the DMCA on that particular point.
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Oh, and don't forget:
5. The way the DMCA is written it doesn't matter how pathetic or useless the lock is, merely that someone tried to digitally protect it.
So, don't forget that defeating this flimsy javascript, is (according to a law bought and paid for by the copyright cartel) just the same as defeating crypto or breaking a physical lock.
Nope. You installed NoScript, or had javascript turned off due to annoying pop-ups, either done for legitimate reasons, then when you visited the site in question saw something you liked and copy/pasted it. No warning appeared. The fact that a "protection mechanism" was applied, but it only did anything when a subset (even if majority) of people went there, means they would have no valid recourse against you. Unless, perhaps, you were stupid enough to brag about how you got around their protections, but
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So much the #4. Yes, there are counterexamples*. But anyone who is actually interested in stealing stuff can put in the extremely modest effort to discover how to bypass Javascript protections.
Put it this way: if so many people can work out that they need to download a torrent application and then wade through torrent search results in order to pirate a movie I think anyone interested in plagiarism can work out turning off Javascript.
* my wife discovered that some of her online photographs had been "stolen"
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"I think you underestimate how many people this sort of thing stops [...] That's sufficient for their purposes, really. They can't stop everyone, no system is perfect, its enough for them to minimize it."
Probably you are right, and that's a problem on its own: most users don't know how to bypass these kind of measures... but most providers seem not to know what they are doing either.
A naive example: I was looking for a second hand car and I was taking notes on candidates: some sites didn't allow me to copy
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They can't stop everyone, no system is perfect, its enough for them to minimize it.
Minimising only works if you can provide the same restrictions on all plays of the content. If you only minimise then the content "becomes available" by other means. Once it's available non-techheads have no problem accessing the content.
e.g. Blu-ray. My girlfriend has no idea how to rip a blu-ray, doesn't have the hardware, the codecs, doesn't know which software she needs to decrypt it, or how the encryption scheme works. That doesn't stop her from having files like The.Avengers.x264.bluray-[guy-who-did-t
Wouldn't the point of this stuff (Score:4, Informative)
Also how slow a news day does it have to be for this to make the front page of
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The DMCA's text cites "effective measures" being circumvented. Not sure this little trick qualifies. Wouldn't want to have to argue it in court, of course. ;)
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I think you're right that it doesn't count but not because it's "trivial to bypass" but because the javascript copy-block is not necessary to access the work and doesn't "[require] the application of information, or a process or a treatment" to access the work.
If you did a simple ROT13 encryption of the text and had javascript decrypt it on load and included copy/paste blocking then I think it'd probably count even though it wouldn't be very effective.
Or if the javascript only "allowed" you to copy/paste 1
Aggregators (Score:4, Informative)
Years ago, fark.com went from external images to hosted images. I didn't see the endgame.
This week, JavaScript is required to load the images. It's vendor lock in all over again. Because who uses an external host if you can just click upload?
And then I see the same advert every 5 posts.
Forbes is a white page to me, LATimes us just the menu with a word or two, and several other sites have absolute divs that cover most of the content.
Your whining about idiotic DRM is just the tip of the iceberg. Bypassing by disabling is one thing. Loading a giant page that renders illegibly requires server resources that, as long as I mostly have wi fi, I'm willing to refresh repeatedly to ensure it really is a problem with the site.
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> since external images would let you track every person that viewed them.
It's particularly crucial to Akamai and ad.doubleclick.net's collaborations. (http://motifcdn2.doubleclick.net/EMEA/ad-in-a-box/LiveStreaming/LiveStreaming_Build_Guide_EN.pdf ).
As a warning, don't be confused by those pseudo-random looking URL's for web images. Many of them do come from the same set of back-end services run by a relatively small set of companies, and they provide tremendous metadata about web use down to the indivi
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But the reasons I've heard more often are
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Years ago, fark.com went from external images to hosted images. I didn't see the endgame. This week, JavaScript is required to load the images. It's vendor lock in all over again. Because who uses an external host if you can just click upload?
Uh, I've Javascript disabled an no problem seeing images in Fark threads.
As a matter of fact, if you've Javascript disabled, there's no "upload" to click and you have to use an external host (Fark then downloads the image from there onto their servers).
And I wouldn't call some forum rehosting external images on their own servers "vendor lock-in".
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I've hit sites that have really stupid javascript created overlays to obscure the page so you have to see their advertisement. Really annoying on a phone or even a tablet, particularly when they manage to push the close widget off of the devices screen. Fortunately, I've discovered that (at least most of them) are defeated simply by canceling the page load as soon as the content appears. The page then presents just fine without having run the javascript to display the advertisement.
How do you stop someone from viewing the source? (Score:2)
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Who says you're using a browser to view or render a web page's contents?
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> can you imagine a webpage blocking alt-f4
Sure, it's the onclose event. By javascript spec, any attempt to close the window should run the onclose stuff, which can simply return false, thus preventing the browser from closing.
Sample for an onclose event (this just fires an alert) is here:
http://www.htmlnest.com/javasc... [htmlnest.com]
You'll notice that it doesn't actually work- not only can you alt-F4, you can also just close the damned window. This is because modern browsers no longer fully support this ludicrous
Re:How do you stop someone from viewing the source (Score:5, Informative)
Javascript is a steaming pile of shit, riddled with vulnerabilities and broken from tip to top.
So of course they try to allow some overrides:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]
Basically, you can google anything with "javascript disable" and get developers asking how to fuck their users in the pee hole. Often, there's an answer.
It wouldn't actually prevent users from viewing source though- I'm not aware of a way to do that. However, if there is, you can find it at good old google bombing expert sex change:
http://www.experts-exchange.co... [experts-exchange.com]
Also note: the real workaround for this isn't globally disabling javascript, though if everyone did that the web would shape up immediately. The real workaround is the various -monkeys that let you redefine pieces of javascript locally. Many sites go through several hoops to prevent loading on a browser that won't run their shitscript, but redefining parts and/or loading your own CSS can get you around most of it.
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Yea, like I said, I'm not aware of any way to do that. If there is one, it won't be effective in general. What they probably did was put a shit lot of linefeeds after a "Viewing source is disabled" comment at the top of the HTML- I'm not even joking, that's a real thing people do lol
But you really can intercept Ctrl-U. The thing is, most browsers simply ignore it, for obvious reasons.
You probably saw this mewling poopsack:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest... [stackoverflow.com]
And this dumb jive turkey:
http://www.makingdiffere [makingdifferent.com]
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This website claims to disable Ctrl-U as well:
http://codingcrazy.com/disable... [codingcrazy.com]
With scripts enabled, it actually seems to disable Ctrl-U in Firefox and Palemoon (not Chrome). Obviously there are easy workarounds (addons solve it easily, but also just changing dom.event.contextmenu.enabled to false lets you happily right click). What do you see when you go there in those browsers?
The point is, obviously there are easy work arounds, and obviously most browsers ignore this crap, and obviously no users will r
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If you need to write a "Web application" then you need access to things people expect to work, just as it works in their OS.
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That's a lie, and that's bullshit. This destroys the user interface, and should never be allowed or tolerated. If these guys weren't malicious, they'd implement a little drag-down menu that would do all their things, or have a standard way of visibly showing the difference between an in-app menu and user level application menu. Even supporting this shit in the code makes developers confused, and they think they can vector hotkeys and tie them to ground.
Fucking idiots and assholes, enabled by a monumental
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Wow... the website genuinely does block Ctrl-U, as well as other hotkeys, such as F12 to activate Firebug, which I didn't know was possible, although just clicking just once in the address bar while the page is showing, and then hitting the desired hotkey bypasses this.
Also, of course, the menu choices to access the source in this way are still enabled and work normally.
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The website tries to own the right click key too. It tries to vector everything it can, but you'll notice that a lot of it fails to work in many browsers, and all of it is trivially able to be worked around.
Javascript is such a turd lol
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That's nice of you, because apparently if he lost his original file, he wouldn't have a backup! You're doing the work of the gods, sir!
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Well, in Firefox and probably others, shift-right-click bypasses all right-click javascript. So if a site disables right-clicking, you can just hold shift and still access "View Page Source" in the context menu. Or anything else - I use an addon called "Nuke Anything" that lets you remove bits of the page and right-click javascript often disables that...
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Right, these assholes made everyone have workarounds. In Chrome, I have "Enable Copy" and "Enable Right Click", and if things get really rough then I go through some kinda monkey or whatever, but that's normally not an issue. I've never seen a browser in recent times that lets a website actually intercept Ctrl-U, but in strange aeons even common sense may die.
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..as a note, http://codingcrazy.com/disable... [codingcrazy.com] does seem to fuck with a default setting firefox or palemoon. Maybe it won't for you, I dunno. You don't need an addon to fix this behavior or anything, of course.
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What does ctrl-U do? I'm on a Mac and as far as I can tell there is no ctrl-U equivalent.
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Your issue isn't that you are on a Mac, it's that you are in a version of Safari of 6 or later. In Lion and before, it was Strange Nordic Whilygig + U.
First, you could run firefox or chrome or whatever.
Second, Safari -> Preferences / Advanced Tab, ensure that the develop menu is on, then you can control click and get some options, among them view source.
This is obviously not as nice as having a keyboard shortcut like you used to have. If that's a deal, just grab a third party browser.
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Ah, so ctrl-U is the short cut for "view source"? Did not get that from the comments.
Even if that is completely disabled, you could just save the page and open it in a text editor.
The developer menus are obviously always activated on my browsers :D
Thanx for the info.
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> Ah, so ctrl-U is the short cut for "view source"?
It's in the links and is quite googlable, but the post I made discussing viewing source should have been the tipoff :P
> Even if that is completely disabled, you could just save the page and open it in a text editor.
Dude, if they think they can disable Ctrl-U, they ALSO think they can disable Ctrl-S and Ctrl-P. Depending on how gullible your browser is, one of the above links tries to do that too.
> The developer menus are obviously always activated
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Yeah, my bad, did not notice that the title of the thread was "Re:How do you stop someone from viewing the source" ;D
Following the stack overflow links I was more wondering about the idiotic approaches many use to accomplish that goal, and I did not really figure by reading them what ctrl-U was supposed to do.
So Safari already has a mode that steps so far above ... I used to use Chrome, but it has several nasty drawbacks for me. I stopped using FireFox since it is automatically u
Not sure if it is far above
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One of the big problems with writing a browser that does what the user wants is how aggressively ludicrous the javascript devs can be. For instance, many browsers have a setting that disables the ability of right click to be controlled from the HTML, but of course javascript can POLL this flag, and act on the result. The browser shouldn't be leaking user state like that, and it certainly shouldn't allow a savvy user to be asked to pull down their pants and bend over. It's totally possible to create a bro
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satya nadella is that u
I googled "is google a verb" and it says yes:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd... [google.com]
Then I bung it:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=i... [bing.com]
So if even bing agrees that google is a verb, I guess that over rules "anonymous coward who can't capitalize for shit"
Not really (Score:2)
You can do things like block the default behavior of the hotkeys and stuff. But you basically can't stop someone from getting the source code, because the web is open.
Avoid Litigation (Score:3)
Using shift key (Score:3, Interesting)
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might inconvenience a few people? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would venture to say that it inconveniences more than a few, the majority of whom have no idea there is an alternative. Typically Joe Sixpack is clueless a click bait victim and the bread and butter of 90% of content sellers.
Besides, Janice in accounting don't give a fuck!
Do you lock your house door? (Score:2)
You got to realize that someone knowledgeable in physical locks can bypass them as easy as you can bypass Javascript right click popups. Yet both still reduce undesirable actions, such as your story being reposted in full on someone's blog without giving credit, link to the source or a chance for you to make money on ads.
It makes a difference when you at least communicate your wishes clearly. Not saying that copying is illegal, or implementing this behavior is best policy, just that it at least significantl
Yep... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes they don't even notice.
There was this site with "lessons" in using some API or library. There were code examples. And if you tried to select and copy, to paste an example into a compiler, a dialog would pop up telling you that the content is copyrighted and you're not allowed to copy it.
And at the bottom of the page was a survey, "What can I do to improve these lessons?"
I filled it out, with my email and a sarcastic comment about the copy restriction - that maybe forcing people to retype the examples isn't the best way of teaching. The owner of the site wrote me with a solemn apology, informing me that she didn't even notice the (dis)functionality was in place, and that it just got installed with the CMS and she didn't disable it because she didn't know it was there...
So... whoops?
I hadn't noticed (Score:3, Informative)
With No-Script blocking all scripting by default, it hadn't dawned on me that such activities occur.
What pisses me off (Score:2)
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Asking things twice makes sense when the field hides what you typed, like password fields. It makes zero sense for email fields.
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What are the other ways? I want to upgrade a few forms,. but I don't know what to.
The average user (Score:4, Informative)
They have no idea that that stuff can be bypassed so easily.
If they did know, they'd think it's too much work.
Then they'd forget about that being possible.
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Ineffective, and rarely tried (Score:2)
Yes, we all know that if they let you look at the page, your computer will download all the associated files and you'll have them. Just taking the files out of your Firefox cache is an obvious solution. Going in with developer tools already open is another one.
That being said, most people don't even try these measures anymore. They used to be a lot more common. But even the average web user is getting more sophisticated.
The new effort is to try to bake DRM into the browsers themselves.
What if... (Score:2)
A bit off topic, but... (Score:2)
... Slashdot has turned me into a screener. With posts like this one, I always check if they're from our friend Bennet before I go to the comments section.
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Lot of sites switched to cloudflare as a cheap method of DDOS protection nothing more. It also makes it a pain in the ass for those of us who are out of the country and have to use a VPN service for work.
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So stop visiting those sites.
Sure, I'll just remove Zendesk and Cisco from the list of companies I occasionally have to do work with. I'm sure that will work out well.
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So stop visiting those sites.
Sure, I'll just remove Zendesk and Cisco from the list of companies I occasionally have to do work with. I'm sure that will work out well.
Why not? Grow a pair, and the world will be a better place.
Re:JavaScript. (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, false pedant, in this case "Javascript" is just a colloquialism for ECMAScript.
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Sorry, false pedant, in this case "Javascript" is just a colloquialism for ECMAScript.
I like this idea, but I think history says that JavaScript was coined long before Netscape handed it over to ECMA.
Re:JavaScript. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:JavaScript. (Score:4, Insightful)
Some programmers weren't even born 20 years ago. New people will make old mistakes because they haven't learned about them yet.
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With more and more single-page websites that use stuff like Angular, it is no longer possible to have a decent Internet experience without javascript. Might as well just browse the Google cache.
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In firefox you can disable clipboard events only, which allows javascript to run but completely nerfs attempts to block copy/paste. about:config
Note however that it will break things like google docs until you re-enable them since that requires overriding copy/paste events apparently are necessary as the browsers provide them rather than more generic operators.
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What are you talking about? I don't "put effort" in using Gmail or Trello.
Javascript is a lot more than ads and tracking. It's a legitimate client-side web technology that makes it possible to run rich apps in the browser or on a mobile device without having to reload pages all the time and without having to use toxic stuff like Flash or ActiveX.
And how the fuck do you post on Slashdot if you don't have javascript enabled?
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Kill yourself
I think people like you play an important role on internet. You're like the crazy homeless people who make the subway ride more entertaining when you've left your kindle at the office.
If I can make a suggestion: maybe if you could sound just a little less like a petulant teenager making angry posts on Facebook, it would make you slightly more relevant. But in any event, keep up the good work!
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The difference is Flash is 100% silo'd. Javascript is like a metasizied cancer.
Also, Flash's AS3 is an object-oriented language with a well defined implementation. JS is neither.