MSC4197: Copy Paste Hints #4197
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| # MSC4197: Copy-Paste Hints | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. Could possibly be more general, ie. it's just picking out the pertinent information from a message rather than necessarily anything to do with copy/paste. |
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| In Matrix today, it can be used for communication. One thing that is communicated is two-factor auth codes. In other platforms, one convenience is being able to quickly copy-paste two factor auth codes. This is not possible in Matrix today. | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. Please wrap your lines to about 80-120 characters |
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| When sending a message, my message could contain a hint to the user's client that they should copy some particular part of the message. I propose to add a new field to `m.room.message` events that will hint to clients what text they could facilitating the user to copy. | ||||||
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| ### Proposal | ||||||
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| * technical details | ||||||
| * describe the solution (This is the solution. Be assertive.) | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. I think these two lines need to be dropped? |
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| `m.room.message` contains a new field, `copy_hint`, under the existing `content` dictionary. This new field will contain a string representing text that the client could present to the user to copy. | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment.
Suggested change
There was a problem hiding this comment. this should probably not be limited to m.room.message. it's effectively an extensible event mix-in to provide an alternative presentation of the message specifically for proposing copy-pasting. |
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| An example is below: | ||||||
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| ```json5 | ||||||
| { | ||||||
| "content": { | ||||||
| "body": "DO NOT SHARE THIS WITH ANYONE!!! Your 2FA code is: 100000", | ||||||
| "m.mentions": {}, | ||||||
| "msgtype": "m.text", | ||||||
| "copy_hint": "100000" | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. please namespace the field, just as There was a problem hiding this comment.
Suggested change
There was a problem hiding this comment. How would I be able to add multiple copy hints? Do I post extra empty messages per hint? Can I set the text to display on the copy button? Thinking for example, a moderation bot might want to provide a way to copy a list of MXIDs, it would be nice to able to say "Copy table", "Copy User IDs", ... Additionally, i wonder if this might be better implemented using a custom HTML tag/property, eg. There was a problem hiding this comment. I agree HTML would be a more elegant solution. Additionally it would make it much easier for humans to send messages with copyable parts. |
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| }, | ||||||
| "origin_server_ts": 1726936182830, | ||||||
| "sender": "@andrewm:element.io", | ||||||
| "type": "m.room.message", | ||||||
| "unsigned": { | ||||||
| "membership": "join", | ||||||
| "age": 54359693, | ||||||
| "transaction_id": "m1726936182657.27" | ||||||
| }, | ||||||
| "event_id": "$4WvO6_skvEIibdffnDKdTkFHtOKUZaPFLm8HJuXcz7E", | ||||||
| "room_id": "!jWkHTegEyVsdPJkjHA:element.io" | ||||||
| } | ||||||
| ``` | ||||||
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| ### Potential Issues | ||||||
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| None considered! | ||||||
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| ### Alternatives | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. might want to mention we're deliberately only letting you hint that a single thing is copyable, given you can only put one thing on a pasteboard. |
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| 1. `hints` dictionary. | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. Rather than coming up with a new taxonomy for hints, it's better to use extensible events... i.e. you'd do an There was a problem hiding this comment. Can you explain what " |
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| 2. Leave things as is (please don't!) | ||||||
| 3. boolean `copy_hint` field (hint to client to copy the whole message) | ||||||
| 4. give up (similar to 2.) | ||||||
| 5. Use indexes in the message | ||||||
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| * Harder to implement | ||||||
| * Use bandwidth | ||||||
| 6. If the event is encrypted, leave the 2FA code out of the encryption | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. A nice refinement could be delete-after copying semantics, but that should be an extra MSC - probably extending the existing MSC2228 self-destructing messages MSC |
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There was a problem hiding this comment. Another possibility would be to add a tag to a |
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| ### Security Considerations | ||||||
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| TODO. | ||||||
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There was a problem hiding this comment. Security concern: What if the text in While alternative 5 adds more complexity to client developers, it reduces the attack surface to only be able to fill the clipboard with things that also are in the There was a problem hiding this comment. There's a risk this could ease phishing attacks where people are encouraged to copy-paste official looking data into their javascript consoles... There was a problem hiding this comment. To justify this concern, here's some well-known implementations of this attack:
There was a problem hiding this comment. massive spam risk here; need to explicitly advise client implementors to not allow 2FA spam to create an explosion of dialogs or similar |
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| ### Unstable prefix | ||||||
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| What is this. | ||||||
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| ### Dependencies | ||||||
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| I do not build on any giant's shoulders. | ||||||
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