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Daring Fireball : Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

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

It is incredibly annoying, I agree.

I wouldn’t mind this “feature” if they’d forgo the three blank lines and create a nicely formatted, shortened URL to credit the source. I might then even use it.

For example, something simply like :

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.

From Daring Fireball.

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. But TechCrunch is itself a weblog that quotes passages from other websites frequently. They’ve instituted a feature that they themselves surely find annoying.

My findings, and thoughts exactly.

HOW TO BLOCK TYNT ON A PC OR MAC

If you use Chrome, you can install this Tynt-blocking extension, which does just what it says on the tin. However, you wind up getting a dialog box each time you encounter a different site using Tynt. (Although only once for each site.)

What I’ve chosen to do is edit my /etc/hosts file to block access system-wide to the tcr.tynt.com server. This is the server from which the Tynt JavaScript code is served to all its “partners”.

Making changes to the hosts file requires administrator privileges, for obvious reasons. If you’re not completely comfortable making changes to an essential Unix configuration file, don’t. This Lifehacker article by Gina Trapani has a good overview of where to find and how to edit your hosts file on Mac OS X or Windows. (BBEdit and its free sibling TextWranglerare my preferred tools for text editing, and both allow you to save files with admin privileges.)

Here’s the line I added to the end of my hosts file:

127.0.0.1   tcr.tynt.com

After saving the hosts file, Tynt’s clipboard-altering nonsense is disabled on all Tynt-using websites I’ve encountered, no matter which browser I use.

Useful advice from Gruber. Thanks.