Jun 01, '10 07:30:01AM • Contributed by: crarko
Here's a brief description:
'Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs. What happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text.'
Please refer to the linked article for more background. The following is derived from that article.
The relevant portion for us is: How to block Tynt on a Mac.
If you use Chrome, you can install this Tynt-blocking extension, which does just what it says on the tin. However, you wind up getting a dialog box each time you encounter a different site using Tynt. (Although only once for each site.)
What I’ve chosen to do is edit my /etc/hosts file to block access system-wide to the tcr.tynt.com server. This is the server from which the Tynt JavaScript code is served to all its 'partners'.
Making changes to the hosts file requires administrator privileges, for obvious reasons. If you’re not completely comfortable making changes to an essential Unix configuration file, don’t. This Lifehacker article by Gina Trapani has a good overview of where to find and how to edit your hosts file on Mac OS X or Windows. (TextWrangler is a fine tool for this kind of text editing, and allows you to save files with admin privileges.) Here's how to edit the hosts file:
- In Finder, from the Go menu, choose Go to Folder...
- In the 'Go to the folder' dialog, type /etc/.
- From the /etc/ folder window, open the 'hosts' file in your favorite text editor.
- Add the following to the hosts file in its own line at the end of the file, using the site that applies to you (Tynt in this case):
- 127.0.0.1 tcr.tynt.com
- Save and quit. You may be asked to authenticate with your admin password to do this.
[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described.]
