ID #1000

Clipboard erased by websites, causing new [untitled] clip.

Symptom: You visit a web page, and a new, empty clip called [untitled] appears in ClipMate.  Or you hear repeated POP or REJECT sounds when you visit the site.

Cause: Some sites have resorted to writing empty strings to the clipboard in an attempt to keep you from copying their information.  As of this writing, two pages known to do this witih Internet Explorer are:

http://www.bank-holidays.com/holidays_2006_29.htm
http://www.qppstudio.net/bankholidays2004/singapore.htm

(Please use caution if you vist these pages - since they feel that it's ok to overwrite your clipboard, there's no telling what else they'd do.  These links are provided as examples only.)

These pages are supposedly using this technique: "hppage protected"

We're not sure what that is, but it's bad.  No program should overwrite the clipboard without your permission, other than specific clipboard-management programs like ClipMate (which implicitly manipulate the clipboard as part of their normal/expected function).

We consider this an unfriendly (possibly malicious?) behavior, and lump it in with other programs that abuse the clipboard by writing to it when you haven't told them to.  We've got a page detailing this at:

http://www.thornsoft.com/developer_commonmistakes.htm

See the "programmer shortcut" section.

 

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