Rob Ferrer’s Thoughts and Writings

I was writing an email to a friend, and tried to copy and paste a URL, but all that get pasted was “Text copying disabled”.

I thought maybe the site was preventing copying, so I disabled Javascript and tried again. Same problem. I tried copying some text within a text editor. Same problem.

Eventually I realised is was a survey I was completing in another tab (I like to multi-task). I looked at the source, and saw no JS. All there was was a piece of flash embedded.

Once I closed the survey everything worked, but it’s a bit worrying that flash can take over your computer to such an extent!

Does anyone know of any security settings that could stop this? Is there anything else Flash can do to take over a computer?

Update 2008-05-20:

I’ve had a lot of people coming to this blog looking for how to fix this. If I’m right, the easiest way to fix this will be to close all web browsers.

If this doesn’t work please let me know and I’ll look in to it. If it does work, feel free to comment too - I’d be interested to know how widespread the problem is.