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Comment by IvanK_net | Hacker News Reader

I am always shocked, that instead of writing the authors of a website to change it, they write to authors of a browser to prevent it.

I think each website provides you a content under a certain conditions, and the browser is not here to let you "steal" every content while absolutely ignoring the conditions.

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> I am always shocked, that instead of writing the authors of a website to change it, they write to authors of a browser to prevent it.

If it's fixed once in the browser, the solution is universal.

Contacting every single website that does this (3+ orders of magnitude more than the number of browsers) is vastly higher effort and unlikely to be 100% successful (or even 50%).

And anyway, it's reasonable to fix this permissions issue in the user tool, rather than on the end of the publisher, because the user tool has incentives more in line with users. E.g., for some reason, browsers today block pop-up ads, although once they were extremely popular with publishers. Do you think asking publishers with pop-up ads to just stop that practice would have worked?

> I think each website provides you a content under a certain conditions, and the browser is not here to let you "steal" every content while absolutely ignoring the conditions.

Pulling single sentence quotes, such as "I think each website provides you a content under a certain conditions, and the browser is not here to let you 'steal' every content while absolutely ignoring the conditions," is very much fair use, not theft.

I used many programs, called "trials", which stopped working after 30 days. So it does not let me use it, while the program itself is on my hard drive, with all resources necessary to run that program.

But the computer belongs to me, and the content of a hard drive too. And the OS should do what I want it to do.

Should I report it as a bug to the creators of my OS? If it's fixed once in the OS, the solution is universal. So that since I downloaded a program to my computer, the OS should make it run every time.

Stop and think about what specific techniques a program might be using to prevent the trial version to continue to run after 30 days. If it needs to phone home to the vendor's servers each time you launch the program, then there's not much the OS can or should be able to do to get in the way of that. You can redirect traffic to your own server that's impersonating the vendor's authentication server, but they can use cryptography to defend against that kind of attack.

But if it's trying to place an undeletable file on your system or something like that (eg. in your boot sector, TurboTax style) to keep track of how many times you've launched the program, then your OS absolutely should protect you from such misbehaviors.

A browser is a user agent that behaves in your favour.

You should remind Google's Chrome teams of that.

The browser is precisely there in order to present the external world to you in the format of your choosing.

It is a user agent.

You are free not to "steal" (lol) the contents of a website if you consider it as such. I think that's totally absurd, but that doesn't stop you.

Nope. Copying content you willingly served over HTTP, an open protocol, without authentication, is not stealing. Not even with scare quotes.

The browser is supposed to serve the user of the browser, not website owners.

What an insane take. You're essentially arguing that we shouldn't try to address security issues, because the person exploiting it wouldn't like that?

> and the browser is not here to let you "steal" every content while absolutely ignoring the conditions.

Beyond the point that publisher is in no position to put conditions here and the usual use of modifying the copy buffer is abusive (injecting links), it would only be anywhere in the neighbourhood of looking like "theft" (I think you meant "plagiarism") if the user pasted it into a work they later publish and profit off in their own name. Copy-pasting snippets into IMs or discussion boards is not "theft", it's quoting. Copy-pasting whole articles to save them is not theft, it's basic personal-use archiving (something I do too, due to ephemerality web content). Copy-pasting entire articles into translation services isn't theft, it's just what people do. Etc.

The browser renders html sent by a website. "Steal" has no place for this web use case. If you need drm, unfortunately the web-browsers have made that available and if this won't work you can fall back to a native app. But none of us should forget that we are transferring a text(txt, html, xml, json, csv....) file between computers.

I mean, if the author of a website does not want you to copy out the text, they will use all existing means to prevent it.

Ok, so Firefox will prevent websites from modifying a clipboard. Then, such websites will show you the text in PNG images. What is next?

> if the author of a website does not want you to copy out the text, they will use all existing means to prevent it.

The author of the website should not want to prevent copying in the first place. It's the 21st century, copying is trivial.

> Ok, so Firefox will prevent websites from modifying a clipboard. Then, such websites will show you the text in PNG images. What is next?

What happens next is those sites will immediately lose a ton of users due to their poor usability. Site translation services will be completely broken. Search engines will fail to index the text contained in the images. People will still be able to save, copy, screenshot, crop, edit and share the image itself; the authors just made their own content look worse on purpose by making it impossible to scale the text properly. If developers care enough about the content, they will eventually create and use an optical character recognition browser extension that extracts the text and overlays it on top of the original image.

The only thing that isn't going to happen next is users going "aw shucks the author's will is absolute so I guess I can't copy the text".

OCR. But anyway, what will really happen is the users will punish the site and not visit it. Calling for website specific solutions is pointless.

> writing the authors of a website to change it

Has this ever worked?

> each website provides you a content under a certain conditions

They just send me HTML when I make HTTP requests even though I haven't seen, read much less agreed to any terms.

> the browser is not here to let you "steal" every content while absolutely ignoring the conditions.

The browser runs on the user's machine. It exists to serve the user, not to enforce "give us access to everything as payment, take it or leave it" non-negotiable terms.

And that's how things should be.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n...

Because this has potential security implications as well. People frequently copy/paste into other applications with the assumption that the text that was copied will be the same as what is pasted.

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