You can disable it on Firefox by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false. I haven't had any issues with it.

Someone shared the code in the comments, it uses 'copy' and 'cut' event listeners, so disabling this setting would have prevented the exploit regardless of an adblock.

dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled=false removes the non-consensual clipboard read access, which is an enhancement but not a strict requisite for attacks of this type. The utility of the other events boils down to mostly convenience: The website can still indirectly observe how you use the clipboard, even when not explicitly notified. The website also remains in control of the CSS properties that can be used to create a meaningful difference between user selection and resulting clipboard content after copying. And, crucially, (blindly) overwriting the clipboard is still permitted.

It prevents event dispatch, upon which this exploit relied. The same could be achieved without listening to clipboard events, in which case the setting would be insufficient. I'm not sure there is a way to fully prevent clipboard manipulation in the browser.

It's you versus Google on that one. Who will win?

Well, it's not just him.

It's Google versus Mankind.

Mankind will eventually prevail against Evil. Google pissed off too many people now, you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit.

> you only need to look at reddit's degoogle subreddit

A drop in the ocean…

Google is constantly rushing from growth record to growth record in the last years.

Never in history has good prevailed over evil for more than a short time.

I would argue the opposite is true. We’ve gone from despotic theocratic regimes controlling essentiallt every living human in the world to democratic self determination being one of the most prevalent political theories on the planet.

The tolerance for slavery, brutal warfare, institutionalized racism and much more is way lower now than it has been in the past.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

For the last... 30 years? At least the first 20 of the last 30 years, and then it reversed.

LOL

The world has always be run by oligarchs, and nothing changed since ten thousands of years.

Most people today on this planet are still slaves.

Black people were bought and sold in the US just a few hundred years ago.

For years one of the perks of being a soldier was raping and pillaging, now that lands you in prison (depending on the country of course).

The world isn’t some utopia where everyone is treated fairly and there are no oligarchs, but I think it’s hard to argue that the amount of justice is unchanged for all of human history.

> I think it’s hard to argue that the amount of justice is unchanged for all of human history

I agree.

It got worse.

The inequality between people was never so high in history! Hard fact.

Now some people "earn" more money while they breeze in and out then large amounts of people earn in their whole life.

Also now the slaves have to pay everything themself (like food, shelter, clothes, in some countries even education). Progress!

I just want to understand:

Are you saying that a black person born in South Carolina today has a worse life and with less justice than a black person born into slavery a few hundred years ago?

I don’t think slaves got university educations for free.

Do they have free university education in South Carolina?

And why only black people?

The implication was that we are worse off now because we have to pay for education, my point is that a black person now may have to pay for education but hundreds of years ago it would have been illegal for them to get any education. To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that we’ve solved all the world’s problems and everything is great, just that I think right does win over wrong over a long enough timespan.

I’m not sure what you mean by “only,” it was just an example.

What is a labor market?

Do you know that today's soldiers still rape and pillage?

What do you mean “what is a labor market?” That we’ve had an open labor market is fairly modern, and even more modern is the idea of broad workers rights. Would you rather work in a factory now, or 150 years ago? Not everything is always getting better and there are ups and downs, but over a long enough time frame we’re clearly always trending towards better.

I guess I thought it was clear that I understand that soldiers still rape and pillage. But it being illegal anywhere is a fairly modern development.

Not with that attitude )

And vice versa

Nor USB devices, nor the screen size, nor ... They can access way too many parts of the OS. But almost nobody cares, as long as they have their shiny feeds and videos.

What?

If copy and paste is disabled in my default browser that would be something like 80% of my total of my total use cases for the clipboard in the first place.

They're not saying your manual copy/pasting from a browser window onto your clipboard shouldn't be possible; they're saying the browser itself shouldn't allow this functionality to be scriptable internally.

The former is a system event, not a browser one.

This is similar to how on google docs if you try to copy via the edit menu, it pops up to say use Ctrl-C instead.

Honestly, I too am surprised a JavaScript plugin was able to access and alter the system clipboard in the first place too.

That depends. For my local use I want to access everything.

For external situations I agree. No clue why browsers started to sniff after people. I blame Google for that.