Tried posting a quote from this article on Smithsonian Magazine about worker deaths in Qatar. I copied a sentence as I usually do when I post to Facebook, and was surprised to discover this additional text:
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/over-900-workers-have-already-died-building-qatars-world-cup-facilities-180950088/#KfGyIi6xpuTPLdSD.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
Good grief! Not only do they force me to link to the article (which I might add, I had already added), but they included a link to their subscription page, and a Twitter reference to boot.
This is unacceptable. Why should someone who happens to see a headline on my news feed be accosted for cash? Wouldn't the best people to try to get to subscribe to a magazine be those who read the article and thought it was interesting.
You can see an interesting conversation about how to add this sort of feature to web pages here on StackOverflow. I was curious how a site could control your clipboard, since that would seem to be a major security violation. The trick, apparently, is to change the selection in the screen itself. Thus, when you select text, the Javascript adds additional content elements to the selection behind the scenes, so that when you copy and paste, the added text is copied as well.
Nifty. My question is, can we develop a means of stopping this manipulation?