Re: [clipboard] Semi-Trusted Events Alternative

We did some user research on this feature when we were building our most
recent flagship product a few years back. Our users' reactions to a sane
site enhancing their clipboard data were unanimously delighted rather than
upset/offended/horrified.

As Hallvord said, sites have been able to do this for 5+ years using Flash
and it hasn't caused any issues/uproar that I've heard of since they fixed
the security model to Flash 10 to match what has been proposed here: the
clipboard injection is only allowed in direct response to a user's
click/keyboard action. (In Flash < 10, the Flash developer could inject
custom contents into the user's clipboard at any time... bad idea.)

Sincerely,
    James Greene
    Sent from my [smart?]phone
On Sep 16, 2014 4:30 AM, "Hallvord R. M. Steen" <hsteen@mozilla.com> wrote:

> > a page can wipe out my
> > entire clipboard history if I move my mouse over it.
>
> Not quite :) Check the list of events - mousemove isn't included:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/browsers.html#allowed-to-show-a-popup
>
> I agree that all the concerns you listed are real. I recall an article
> I've seen about a court case against a teacher because a school computer
> was infected with malware and happened to display some porn during this
> teacher's class. I think this was in the U.S. or UK, so even the countries
> we tend to think have the most developed legal systems have problems with
> basic tech literacy! It's a sad fact that the web is implemented in such an
> imperfect world..and we should definitely keep that in mind.
>
> However, I hope that checking the list of events will help - the policy
> has more limitations than you seem to think. I still think that the popup
> precedent gives us reason for some optimism - it also shows that if an
> aspect of web technology is abused and causes nuisance, browser vendors
> will step up to implement limitations. I think in the long run, this is
> also the case with clipboard APIs - we're spec'ing something trying to
> balance the usability and trust issues, if we get it right we've enabled
> some more functionality for web apps without too much nuisance and abuse -
> if we get it wrong, we probably have to revisit this and lock it down with
> site whitelists and such. Keeping in mind that Flash has had similar
> policies for a while and "some site put weird stuff on my clipboard" hasn't
> been a frequent complaint so far (and AFAIK hasn't been needed as defence
> in court yet), I think and hope we're shipping a reasonable and balanced
> policy here.
> -Hallvord
>