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.