Ever copied a chunk of text from a news article to send to someone, and found that when you paste it you get an annoying attribution line on the end? Something like this:
Some months after the attack in Al Majalah, Amnesty International released photos showing an American cluster bomb and a propulsion unit from a Tomahawk cruise missile.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/john-brennan-and-the-truth-about-drones.html/#ixzz0oyLiD4Qh
That's irritating, arrogant and pisses me off. And it's invoked using Javascript and a product from my Annoying Arsehole Company Of The Week, Tynt.
I love some of the comments from their product page:
Improve SEO rankings - read: helps you spam search engines and cheat on how popular your site is.
Drive incremental traffic - read: perpetuates the fallacy that clicks and views actually mean anything on the web. Like the fallacy that single-click activism actually means anything more than someone troubled to move their mouse a couple of millimetres, don't you think that page views that you generated yourself through link spamming might not be a terribly good indicator of actual content attractiveness?
Actionable editorial insights - I'm not even sure what that combination of words means. I think the blurb on the page comes down to pandering to your reader's tastes?
Enhance your user experience - yeah, by spamming. Good move.
Get credit for your content - what for the eight words it takes to trigger the crap on TechCrunch?
Fortunately, there's a fairly easy way to block this bullshit. Add this to your hosts file and null out the lookup from the Javascript to the Tynt server.
127.0.0.1 tcr.tynt.com
Fuck you, spammer, and goodnight.
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