Episode: 2100
Title: HPR2100: Re-Enable Copy and Paste in Browsers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2100/hpr2100.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:17:41

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This in HPR episode 2,100 been titled, Reenable Copy and Paste in Brownen, it is posted
by Ken Fallon and in about 5 minutes long, the summary is how to bypass a roadblock
implemented by Navas Crypt.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15, better web hosting that's Honest and
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Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon and you're listening to another episode of Hacker
Public Radio.
Today I want to talk to you about re-enabling copying and pasting in your browser.
I came across this on a few sites recently where in the vein attempt to improve password
security, they require you to re-type your password in the confirmation field and they
would not let you paste it in.
So for example, if your password is correct horse battery stable, you need to type that
into the first one and you also then need to re-type it into the bottom one.
Now most of these sites also require you to have upper and lower case and zeros and
squiggly and all sorts of things, so T or zero, UB4, DOR, Apercent 3 with an uppercase
T.
So yes, as somebody who has a policy of having long and unique passwords on various
different websites, I just tracked them using my own system and 40 characters long with
random passwords.
You can imagine that not being able to paste it in actually diminishes the level of security
because I will, in my 40 characters, make a mistake in an upper and lower case if I
have to do that.
So this practice should stop and it should stop immediately.
You want to encourage people to put in as long passwords as possible and to use the password
manager.
In fact, you should be recommending that on your website.
All the reason people disable copy and paste and right-clicking and all this stuff is
to prevent people from viewing the source code of their files.
Well I think that's a very rude thing to do in the web because the web is built on the
foundation of people being able to look at other people's codes and look at a lot of
the people's innovations and be able to while a copy get inspiration from the code that
other people have written.
And in some cases, yes, copy away because that's what the license allows you to do.
So I consider it just rather rude that you have built up your expertise over the years
and you're preventing somebody from preventing the new users from being able to view your
website.
And of course, the barrier that you are preventing are the people who are new to the technology
because anybody who's been working with browsers over a period of time will already be used
and stuff like Fiddler or Proxies and will already be able to press F12 and to develop
for tools and be able to view in and see exactly what you're doing.
So you're achieving absolutely nothing because you do not own the environment on which the
code you're writing runs on.
That is owned by another person and that person can do pretty much whatever they want because
it's their computer.
Technically, morally, that is the way it is and realistically, that is the way it is.
So however, to make it life easier for us, I just want to bring to your attention two
little places where you can enable a copy and paste and in Firefox, it's actually quite
easy and Nicholas Miller and the link it will be in the show notes explains how he
re-enabled it for PayPal.
And you go into a bout, call on config and then you type in a clipboard and then you'll
see dom.events.clipboards.enabled and the Boolean is such a true.
If you double click, that will switch to false and that allows you to copy and paste in Firefox.
In Chrome, it's a little bit more complex and I had to search for two plugins to do
exactly the same thing.
One is called allow copy and the other one is don't and the effort with paste makes it
very hard to find on the Chrome store because that word is filtered out but the link is
in the show notes here to this episode and both of them when enabled will happily allow
you to copy and paste in your secure password and allow you to get on your day with your day
without the annoyances of pretend security theater.
Okay folks, apologies for that little rant and tune in to our offer another exciting
episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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