
Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks - biafra
http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks
======
GavinB
I find it a bit odd that Gruber fails to mention the obvious motivation behind
this: to get people to click on the links and increase their traffic. It's not
about SEO black magic or increasing their ability to track links, it's
including an attribution with copied material in order to increase page views
and visibility.

Now, I don't like that they use javascript to break your copy-paste
functionality. It's unexpected and unrequested, so we are annoyed and confused
by it. I wouldn't use Tynt.

Still, it's worth remembering that citations are a good thing. How many times
have we on HN lambasted a site for not including proper attribute to copy and
pasted text? How many times have we complained when someone pasted a quote or
data in a comment here with no citation?

As unsavory and anti-usability as it is, I can understand the motivations
behind Techcrunch and NYT. They're tired of their material being spread around
without the courtesy of a backlink, and hope that by making it easier to cite
than not to cite, they can encourage links.

In an ideal world, I can imagine that copy-paste would include metadata in
some less obtrusive and more user-dictated manner. Tynt isn't doing it right,
but attribution and links are a good thing to encourage.

~~~
tomlin
The solution is simple. Don't visit sites that employ Tynt.

~~~
mbateman
Or do what Gruber suggests and block Tynt in /etc/hosts

~~~
bshep
or add it to adblock ;-)

~~~
za
It's in the easyprivacy filter - <http://easylist.adblockplus.org/>

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Ah. And I was wondering why I didn't see it anywhere. One more reason to run
AdBlock and NoScript.

------
mattmanser
The copy-paste thing bugs me, but what really drives me insane is the
highlight 3-words or less functionality. When I spot a word or thing that I
want to know more about, I usually highlight, right click, and choose search.
This works in both Chrome and IE8+. Firefox may even do it too, I don't use
it.

With Tynt, it cancels the right-click menu and pops up a search bubble.

Mucking around with browser behaviour is not cool. Usually I try 3 or 4 times
in confusion until I realise and promptly close the website in disgust.

~~~
alanh
Similarly, the New York Times intrusively assumes I want to "define" anything
I select, even it’s lines long, breaking my normal browser behavior.

 _Edit:_ I triple-click to select paragraphs (an OS X idiom); the define-word
script prevents this, recognizing not a triple-click but rather a double-click
(select word) followed by a single click (activate definition pop-up).

~~~
perokreco
Triple clicking is not an OS X idiom, it works on Windows too.

~~~
alanh
Does it work everywhere? Last I checked, it doesn’t work in browser address
bars, for example.

------
alaithea
I haven't looked at their script. I'm curious whether they transmit selected
text, as Daring Fireball seems to suggest, or only copied text. If the former,
they're going to get a lot of false positives from those of us who
neurotically select blocks of text on pages for no reason while reading.

~~~
smokinn
I guess at least now I know I'm not alone. I'm very OCD about clicking on
random words, triple clicking on paragraphs to highlight them entirely while
I'm reading or just dragging my mouse over random amounts of text on the page.
I don't know why I do it but it drives pretty much everyone reading the same
thing as me on the same computer insane.

~~~
yesbabyyes
I do all of this, too. Especially selecting paragraphs. Actually, now that I
think about it (which I do fairly often, tbh), this is one of the reasons I've
stayed with Firefox. It only highlights the text of the paragraph. WebKit
highlights to the end of the line, and some more, I think. It isn't as
visually appealing, at all.

We had an intern at our company for a week, a smart guy who is graduating from
high school, and he pointed out all of these things about me. I also manically
tap caps lock with my left pinkie.

I'd rather not think about this part of me too much, especially when it comes
to picking browser based on how it renders (manically) selected paragraphs.

~~~
ComputerGuru
No it doesn't, at least, not any more :)

Chrome 6 on OS X, triple-clicking on the word "WebKit":

<http://grab.by/4DKh>

------
raganwald
This stinks of Enterprise Software, the alternate reality where a salesman
sells something that doesn't work to an executive that doesn't really care
because there is no objective metric of success applied to the purchase, just
the question of whether it can be 'spun' into something that makes the
purchaser look good.

I'd like to see any of Tynt's customers weigh in and explain how they are
measuring Tynt's effectiveness. Are any of them using A/B testing or otherwise
quantifying the costs and benefits?

------
mrkurt
They drive me nuts. There's an opt out here though:
<http://www.tynt.com/support/opt-inout/>

I just block it at the home router. It feels more brutal. :)

------
NathanKP
This article doesn't even mention the biggest problem with Tynt: copying and
pasting code snippets. I hate it when Tynt is installed on a website that has
code snippets or tutorials. When I copy the code I have to delete the Tynt
message. It wouldn't be so bad if it was smart enough to detect the coding
language and insert the attribution within comments.

I suggested that feature months ago when I first discovered Tynt, but they
never implemented it or even responded.

~~~
edanm
That's actually a feature I wish existed in e.g. StackOverflow. They actually
_do_ know which language code is written in, so they should include a comment
before the copied code which links to the question.

I do this myself with any snippets I copy from sites, since I always find
myself going back to the site at least once.

------
wvenable
I don't fault Tynt for creating this service; it's actually a bit clever. I
reserve all my blame for the websites that actually use this service.

~~~
raganwald
Consider this bit of 'cleverness:" Encode music CDs with a Windows rootkit
that prevents copying of unencrypted music from said CDs, phones home, and
otherwise helps 'protect music owner's IP from piracy.'

Do we not fault the creator and instead fault the companies that buy it?

Here's a horse I have been beating for several decades: "Fault" or "Blame"
does not obey the laws of conservation. Just because we blame Alice for
failing to check her blind spot before making a lane change doesn't mean we
absolve Bob of fault for ignoring her turn signal.

It's reprehensible to make and sell this stuff. It's also self-defeating to
buy and deploy it.

~~~
cujo
To the car analogy. That's exactly what it means. As a driver I have no
obligation to honor your request to change lanes. It is your obligation to
decide if moving sideways into my car is the right move.

In the above case, and in tynt's they aren't doing anything wrong. It is more
analogous to gun control, without the dire consequences of misuse.

~~~
raganwald
> As a driver I have no obligation to honor your request to change lanes. It
> is your obligation to decide if moving sideways into my car is the right
> move.

Please don't stick to "the letter of the law" in Ontario. I respect your right
to have an opinion about this, but would despair if such a choice resulted in
injuries or death.

In Ontario we have no-fault insurance for exactly this reason. If you choose
not to respect someone else's signal and an accident results, you are both
getting dinged for the cost of repairs. Your failure to "drive defensively" is
your fault, regardless of the official rules for right-of-way.

Fault is only of interest if the police end up laying certain types of
criminal charges. You might escape fault if the other driver runs a red and
hits you. You will not escape fault if you see another driver signal a lane
change and you have time to slow down and allow them to change lanes.

If someone changes lanes into you and you had no reasonable chance to react,
you're possibly off the hook. But there's really no reason to see someone
signal a lane change and bull right through without being very certain that
they know you're there and plan to wait for you to proceed.

------
kareemm
Gruber's an edge case, and he admits it:

"Now, the nature of my work writing Daring Fireball involves copying and
pasting many snippets of text from web sites every day. So this Tynt stuff
probably annoys me more (or at least more frequently) than most people."

I was actually pleasantly surprised the first time I pasted a passage from a
Tynt-enabled website into an email and the URL showed up. I send these types
of emails all the time and it saves me time.

~~~
irons
I'd have thought there was a bright line between people like my parents who
use the ubiquitous "share this link" site features, and people like me who
send messages with links and excerpts tailored to the recipient. If I'm right,
you're an edgier edge case than Mr. Gruber.

------
tumult
Yes, I hate these douchebags. I also hate the people who use them. I have a
modified Chromium that specifically prevents this tampering with selection
(null out the webkit javascript hooks for selection stuff) and an extension
that will give a little blip whenever I land on a page that uses them or
something like it.

It pisses me off. I can't believe people think this is a good idea. When the
spammers/ad people start using HTML5 audio to blast annoying crap at you,
HTML5 locations to figure out how to send junk mail to your house, and other
crap that browser makers were too short-sighted to realize were a bad idea to
give sites the power to control, then we're going to see a regression in
browser features as "does less" becomes the default.

Right now, the sites you visit have way too much control over what they can do
to your browser. It's naïve to think that these people will just 'play nice'
and not abuse features. The SEO and ad people will take whatever length of
thread you give them and completely unravel the shirt off of your back.

~~~
daleharvey
crippling the functionality of the browser isnt going to harm people
developing these exploits, they will just use toolbars and plugins whatever.

all it does is hurt people who want to build real web applications, the
complete lack of support for copy and paste is a major major pita in that
regard.

~~~
tumult
Uh, you _can_ tamper with the clipboard from JavaScript. That's why this
works, and why it's a problem. You shouldn't be able to by default.

~~~
daleharvey
you cant, these things employ tricks like a hidden textarea that gets focused
and selected when ctrl+c gets keyed down (safari does have a copy / paste
events), the same can happen on paste, flash also has access to write to the
clipboard, sometimes. its buggy and annoying though.

but it means 1. applications cant have copy paste buttons 2. if you have a
special clipboard (googles cloud clipboard), you have 2 clipboards that can
very easily become out of sync.

preventing abuse of the clipboard by completely killing its functionality is
like banning apples because someone chocked on one once, there are much
simpler solutions (like firefoxs geolocation permission dialog)

~~~
Kadin
I don't see why JS code running on a page in the browser should have access to
my computer's local clipboard. That's a misfeature at best, and it's ripe for
abuse.

Web apps that really need access to the local clipboard should have to jump
through some hoops in order to access it, just like they have to jump through
hoops to access the local filesystem. Perhaps we could make those permissions
persist, so that users wouldn't have to constantly authorize a particular site
(like Google Docs) that they want to let access their clipboard, but it should
definitely not be accessible to the world by default.

~~~
JadeNB
> That's a misfeature at best, and it's ripe for abuse.

I'm with the group that despises this behaviour (although I think I can't
quite manage to work up to outrage), but I'm puzzled by this. Since the
(mis)feature has already _been_ abused, I assume you're referring to possible
worse future abuses; but I can't think of any. Could you clarify?

~~~
Kadin
I mean that the implementation is not a true feature, but a quasi-bug in
disguise.

This definition sums up my use of the term fairly well
(<http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/misfeature>):

>A feature that eventually causes lossage, possibly because it is not adequate
for a new situation that has evolved. Since it results from a deliberate and
properly implemented feature, a misfeature is not a bug. Nor is it a simple
unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the feature in question was
carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were not accurately or
adequately predicted...

At some point, someone must have thought that allowing JavaScript access to
the clipboard would be a neat idea. And on a whiteboard, it _does_ seem like a
neat idea. But in the extremely hostile environment of the Internet, where
every feature _will be abused_ in the most user-hostile ways possible, it is a
liability rather than an asset.

The Internet has a long history of such features: the ability of a page to
spawn new windows, which led to popups, is the one of the most glaring to
casual users, but Usenet's CANCEL messages and the ensuing Hipcrime debacle is
IMO more to the point.

The prevailing attitude when developing desktop operating systems, which
provide tools to developers under the assumption that they will be reasonably
careful with them ('with great power comes great responsibility'), fails
completely on the Internet. On the desktop, you can assume that obviously
flawed, hostile software will get eliminated by the market -- a few people
might get burned, but then nobody will install it, problem solved. On the
Internet, this doesn't work; if you release a browser with a "feature" that
can be exploited to take advantage of users or even to merely annoy them, it
_will_ be used, and it won't just be used a few times, it will be used over,
and over, and over ... until the feature is hardened or removed (e.g. the
BLINK tag, early ActiveX).

I am very concerned that the rush to provide desktop-application-like
capabilities to web apps will open a huge can of worms in terms of the new
avenues for abuse that it allows, and the overall effect of this -- when the
abuse happens in spades, which it will -- will be to cause users to disable
those features globally, and distrust web apps in general.

~~~
daleharvey
I explained above javascript does not have access to the clipboard, this abuse
is possible because we can bind events to keypresses, should we ban that?

the idea that users should implicitly trust desktop applications more than web
based programs is silly, desktop applications havent been abused? users should
know what the difference between a desktop application and a web one is?

firefox geolocation / save password dialog, or chrome / iphone application
install process are easy solutions to explicit permissions, the idea that the
clipboard is off limits is silly.

------
javery
Honestly it doesn't really bother me, it has been useful from time to time
when copying something (saves me the next step of copying the URL).

It sounds like they should add an opt-out though.

~~~
mjijackson
To suggest an opt-out is missing the point entirely. If anything, it should be
opt-in.

~~~
Timothee
It should be a browser feature/plug-in, or not be there at all.

------
mortenjorck
This is merely the Web2.0 version of the old image-protection script that pops
up an indignant message from the webmaster upon right-click. It too will die
out.

------
adamhowell
I couldn't help but pronounce it "Taint" as I read this. What a terrible name.

~~~
Semiapies
Why "taint" and not "tint"?

~~~
pierrefar
It's making copy/paste worse, so definitely "taint".

~~~
Semiapies
Fair enough, but I thought the prior poster meant a non-intentional version of
that.

~~~
adamhowell
Nope, very intentional. Same kind of thing happens whenever I read about
Minority Leader John Boehner, too, for some reason.

------
latch
I ran into this today...it took me about 3 copy/paste attempts to realize what
was going on. I could see some users never really figuring it out.

Changing the behavior of copy/paste seems quite silly.

------
bartl
I've never seen this, not even on the page the article linked to as an
example, but that may be due to NoScript.

Yet another example of why NoScript is a good idea.

~~~
DrSprout
Tynt was the primary thing that drove me to install NoScript.

------
jamesshamenski
I think tynt actually knows what was selected and copied even if it wasn't
pasted. That nugget of data is captured and the content source can see what
info people wanted a deeper dive on. ex: people commonly paste names and
unfamiliar words. It's an indication of the lead generated by the article and
helpful for editorial and advertising teams.

------
WiseWeasel
This "service" has bugged the hell out of me, making me delete the garbage at
the end each time I copy some text. The worst is on sites that have user
comments, when you're having conversations with people and quoting their text
to reply to them. Tynt is now happily added to my Hosts file.

------
blhack
I have a social bookmarking site and this drives me nuts. Lots of users just
copy the articles headline, and this garbage comes with it... I suppose one
way of fixing that would be to chop everything after \n...

Huffington post was the first one I noticed.

------
ekanes
Before I clicked on the link, I thought "Tynt" was a new acronym I hadn't
heard of since it didn't sound like a word. I figured it must be Thank You No
Thanks... which kinda works. :)

------
DotSauce
For those interested in the benefits of Tynt Insight for publishers, please
read this article:

[http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/03/09/website-data-social-
shari...](http://www.dotsauce.com/2010/03/09/website-data-social-sharing-
traffic-trends/)

"Email is used for 70% of all social sharing and accounts for 48% of new site
traffic."

For comparison, Facebook only accounts for 25%.

I'm guessing Gruber didn't get a chance to review this report from Tynt.

------
tamersalama
This has been here here before (perhaps with milder tones)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491003>

A relative comment is that this service is not for the "technically inclined".

Personally - I'm used to highlighting all the text I read (not sure why). I
would prefer an opt-out option to remember my choices across tynt-enabled
websites.

------
pavel_lishin
Not only does this break copy and paste, it's incredibly annoying when I want
to paste a single line into my IRC client, and tinker with it before sending.

Instead, I end up pasting the thing, and the stupid URL, since the newlines
send the message.

------
minalecs
Strange no matter what browser I try to copy and paste, can't seem to see this
happening. Any ideas as to why I'm unable to see this script.. I guess its a
good thing I'm not effected by it, but out of curiosity would like to see.

------
coverband
Citations are good. Web analytics are good. Personalized service is good. This
service doesn't bother me at all -- if you plan not to give attribution to
your source ("you bad bad dog"), just remove the link they add. If you have
difficulty copying something because of their JavaScript, just open the source
and copy/paste from there.

Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint. Gruber should surf
those sites on his iPad to get rid of the right-click hooks... Or use an older
version of iPhone that doesn't offer copy/paste...

~~~
nocman
"Why is this even a top link on HN? It's a stupid complaint."

Obviously not everyone here agrees with you that it is a stupid complaint.

------
grogers
Thankfully select + middle mouse button in X isn't affected by this.

------
TorKlingberg
Some Chinese websites do this, but they put their address after each
paragraph. I think they do it the Web1.0 way though: white text on white
background.

------
marcamillion
The truth is, the first time I encountered this it was a little off-putting.

However, it actually turned out to be quite useful. Especially, given that
when I quote I am usually doing attribution anyway, it saves me at least 3 or
4 steps (i.e. post paste of quote, go back to URL, copy URL, go to blog,
insert link, etc.)

------
alextingle
This reminds me of the arguments over Google's attempts to "fix" copying from
their broken URL-bar in the latest versions of Chromium:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467>

------
metachris
Wow, tynt recently raised $8m. What do they need all that money for?
[http://www.tynt.com/tynt-raises-8m-in-venture-capital-to-
fue...](http://www.tynt.com/tynt-raises-8m-in-venture-capital-to-fuel-growth-
in-web-2-0-content-sharing-analytics/)

~~~
dkarl
Being jerks.

------
phreeza
The New York Times has something similar, where they look up any word you
highlight in a dictionary. If I recall correctly, this used to be worse, but
is still around in some form. Used to drive me nuts, because I neurotically
highlight text all the time.

------
agentultra
Or... block the .js in your browser.

Or use a text-based browser for browsing your text. I find that w3m actually
works quite well. With a few extra programs it can even load images. Fancy
that!

------
cookiecaper
I've never noticed this, I guess because I almost always highlight and middle-
click to copy things, which only works on Linux/X afaik.

------
sacrilicious
Maybe I'm too old if I start identifying with corporations like this, but....
This actually seems like something Tumblr or Posterous should allow their
customers, "aggregators" of choice quotations, to opt-in for. Then it would be
in the hands of people who _want_ the sites they are considering important
enough to 're-broadcast' to know how their work is being excerpted, and when.
Just an idea of a positive outcome of this practice being released on the
world.

~~~
sacrilicious
To clarify, I'm not suggesting Tumblr use this service, or any other that
refers to peoples work as "content". "Keep the corporations out of my
clipboard!" is being a bit overreactive, as this is of dubious use to the
market and obviously ineffective so it will probably go away of its own
accord. I'm speaking for myself when I say it seems we should have better ways
to bring writers into the dialog when we don't explicitly go through the steps
of attributing their work, if a blogging engine like Tumblr doesn't already
incorporate that to some extent.

------
pclark
this must have recently been implemented on techcrunch. I just wanted to
forward an article to a friend, i selected a paragraph and pasted it in the
email - it was actually really handy having the read more snippet at the end
of the paste.

but it'd be infuriating if you were doing this, for example, in IM and had to
remove 5 lines every paste.

opt in, not out.

------
sscheper
Gruber sounds like a whining teenager. It's the publishers' prerogative to (i)
get attributed for their work, and (ii) get some SEO juice back to their site.

I suspect that he's just bored, suffering from writer's block, and needs and
outlet to get it out. There, you've cried on the shoulder of a bunch of hacker
news dudes. Feel better now?

------
malvosenior
The New Yorker is a high caliber publication?

------
w1ntermute
I don't understand why people are complaining. Not only are these websites
giving you free content (beggars can't be choosers), but this problem is
ridiculously easy to fix; just add the EasyPrivacy filter to your AdBlock Plus
installation from here: <http://easylist.adblockplus.org/>

Here's a direct link to subscribe:
abp:subscribe?location=https%3A%2F%2Feasylist-
downloads.adblockplus.org%2Feasyprivacy.txt&title=EasyPrivacy

~~~
mfr
If you don't understand why people are complaining, you may want to take a
moment to understand why.

You have shown how to block it, but there is a larger discussion of why or why
not it's bad, how it breaks copy/paste, attribution problems, and so on. You
might do well to look outside the narrow technical bounds of fixing a specific
technical problem to think about the greater issue.

~~~
jrockway
To be fair, it's kind of like leaving your door open and sticking a sign on
the side of your house saying "TV inside", and then complaining when someone
steals your TV. Sure, they shouldn't have done it, but you would have never
even thought about the problem if you just locked your door.

Locking your door on the Internet includes using AdBlock (with easylist and
easyfilter), NoScript, Privoxy, Tor, and so on. (I skip Tor, but the other
ones are quite non-invasive. Sometimes I accidentally browse the Internet
without Adblock, and feel very confused as to why every site is all of a
sudden so ugly.)

