but it is tangentially related to the tangent discussion of how many letters in an address are needed to guaranteee no clipboard malware. apparently the answer is 4 letters in front and 4 at the end.
That's not correct. Checking 8 characters makes it
unlikely you will fall victim to clipboard malware for now, although the required number of characters to be relatively safe will continue to increase as malware becomes more sophisticated, vanity generators more efficient, and hardware more powerful. If you want to
guarantee you have not fallen victim to clipboard malware, then the only right answer is the check the full address.
Again, this takes <10 seconds to do. I don't understand why people make such a song and dance about it. In the time it takes you to write a single post saying that you think checking the whole address in unnecessary, you could have checked the whole address for your next 10 transactions.