Land Of Oorang

OK, so by now you have probably heard of the Clipboard Hijacking problem. Apparently some joyous advertisers are, in a misguided (and annoying) attempt to get you to visit their site have come up with away via flash ads to put the URL of their website into your clipboard... Permanently. Which is, of course, really annoying because you probably still wanted to use your clipboard to copy and paste stuff.

The details and proof of concept are available at ZDNet's Zero Day Blog.But the good news is if you have Firefox there is a manual fix without having to restart your browser or reboot your system (as usual IE users are left in the cold.. at least so far). All you have to do is go toTools>Add-ons>Plugins, scroll down until you see "ShockwaveFlash" (I don't know why it's still called Shockwave, but that is what it is labeled), then click the "Disable" button once, and immediately click "Enable" again. Close the add ons window you are done. Note the value will still be in the clipboard, but if you go to copy/cut something else you will now be able to. 

    So I went with the masses and switched to FireFox 3. I noticed that, much like the beta, the full release still wouldn't run about 30%of my add-ons. Some of them would, or self-updated to version thatwould, but some of them just wouldn't. One of these was my Del.icio.us Add-in. Then a light bulb came on, and I was like "I wonder if they released it as a different plug-in?" So I went and looked and, sure enough, they had.  So after a quick "W00t!" I downloaded it and restarted. And this is where the trouble started.

   On page two (of four) of the install wizard you are asked to log in. I logged in. But the wizard's "Next" button stubbornly remained grayedout. Curses. So I logged in again. Still gray. I clicked previous andnext in the vain hope that the login detection would be tripped. Nojoy. I did it a few more time as if doing the exact same thing wouldyield different results. It did not (I know, I'm amazed too). So Iclicked Cancel to look up troubleshooting tips and it uninstalled itself! That's right, either log in on the first run or no Del.icio.us for you.

    That was annoying, but not nearly as annoying as it was on the 4thor 5th time I had to re-download the plug-in whilst I tried various(futile) solutions. And finally it occurred to me. In my privacysettings (tools>options>privacy) I was not allowing third partycookies. I was like "nooo, couldn't be could it? The website works finewith that setting." And work fine the website does indeed do, but notthe plug in. One click fixed it.

    So if you are trying to install the Firefox 3 Del.icio.us plug-i, as of version 2.0.64... Enable Third Party Cookies. You can do this by by just enabling 3rd Party Cookies enabled, or you can create a special exception for http://del.icio.us In Firefox 3 go to tools>options>privacy>exceptions.