Injecting text into the clipboard, in all major browsers.

Below appears to be the innocent text: 'Hello World'.

Hello YOU JUST LOST THE GAME world.

Try copy & pasting the above text.

See what happened there? I've put another element mid-way between the text, which, as Firefox appears to select text based on the code, not on-screen location, is selected. This element is positioned far off-screen. No javascript, no flash, just XHTML and CSS. Harmless fun, right?

Right, but could this be used maliciously?

http://www.google.lolattacksite.com

Try that one. In the day and age when people are told to copy/paste links to sites to avoid fake links, this is a pretty easy way to falsify a link. It's not entirely effective, as it's easy to spot when you paste, but if one uses a long URL and masks it cleverly, it could be an effective tactic.

Long cat is looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.

While not a huge problem, it's an interesting idea, at the least. This has been submitted as a bug, but as it's not really a bug, only has small malicious uses, and is simply the only efficient way of selecting text, it's not going to be 'fixed' any time soon.

It'd be interesting to inject 'THIS TEXT HAS BEEN PLAGIARISED' into a bunch of likely 'essay' articles, see who reads carefully...