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Comment by proaralyst

3 days ago

It's a feature of X (so works in any app running in X, not just FF and your terminal emulator). Wayland changed clipboard behaviour (along with many other things) and decided the selection clipboard was too large a security hole to keep. It's pretty useful though, so Gnome added it back, on top of Wayland. It's still a large security hole though!

Separately, PuTTY has a similar mechanism for copy, though this goes in the normal Windows clipboard.

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proaralyst

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palata  3 days ago

> It's still a large security hole though!

May I ask how it is a large security hole and how it is larger than the "Ctrl+C" clipboard? Genuinely interested.

  • takluyver  3 days ago

    A web page with Javascript can see & send off something you paste into a text box as soon as it appears. So if you accidentally paste some confidential information, like a password, that's a security hole even if you notice and delete it straight away. This happens even for totally innocent reasons, like search-as-you-type.

    Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V copy and paste is not such a big issue because far more people are familiar with it, and it requires more deliberate actions on both sides (copying and pasting). So you're less likely to accidentally copy something around that you didn't mean to.

    • palata  3 days ago

      > So if you accidentally paste some confidential information

      So nothing like a "large security hole" that needs to be fixed, right?

      I mean at this point, "SSH is a large security hole because people may enter their password while someone looks at their keyboard". I wouldn't consider that a reason to remove SSH.

    • wafflemaker  3 days ago

      So you would still need to paste deliberately.

      So it's not really a security hole as much as knowing your passwords and muttering them in your sleep is one.