If it's a button to click anyway, couldn't this just be a bookmarklet?
Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#32The project is clearly motivated by Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text [0] (posted 12 hours ago on HN), and many people here might think zero-width characters (or rather, any esoteric Unicode characters) are the only (or the prominent) way to watermark texts, which is wrong. The whole topic - watermarking - is worth at the very least a lengthy blog post, and maybe even several articles,…
Excellent list. For completion's sake, I'd include intentional typos as an instance of category 5. This can be hard to catch if the typo is in a name. A logical extension of that would be entirely made-up names for non-essential people/places.
At the age of 5, Hawking visited Oxford, incidentally passing through Fakenamingham-on-Watermarkshire.
Dictionaries/encyclopedias have been known to insert entirely fake entries as a way of proving ownership.(http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-09-21/features/05092...) In the age of ebooks and print-on-demand, those could be tailored to the individual licensee.
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#33Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#34It's starting to seem like the universe has some fundamental order for things that we can escape temporarily, but that are inescapable in the long run. 1. Photo and video evidence was a game-changer for establishing facts and chronologies. As we've seen, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish fake photos and videos from real. It's not a stretch to predict a time when we'll only be able to make probabilistic s…
> ... the "natural state" is one where word-of-mouth and first-hand accounts are the most authoritative evidence we can have (other than physical evidence like DNA left behind) First-hand accounts aren't always reliable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony
I think they're proposing more that these accounts are authentic, not necessarily reliable. It's common sense that eyewitness testimony isn't 100% reliable.
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#35It's starting to seem like the universe has some fundamental order for things that we can escape temporarily, but that are inescapable in the long run. 1. Photo and video evidence was a game-changer for establishing facts and chronologies. As we've seen, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish fake photos and videos from real. It's not a stretch to predict a time when we'll only be able to make probabilistic s…
First-hand accounts are quite literally one of the least reliable sources of truth regarding many kinds of events. Brains fill in a lot of gaps with heuristics.
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zero width characters can also be used to force long strings of text to wrap correctly, so this may break the layout of sites that allow things like URLs in UGC text.
Why would a website flow through a user's clipboard?
they're talking about OP's extension that modifies how the website is presented. Not the clipboard idea.
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#37If it's a button to click anyway, couldn't this just be a bookmarklet?
Yep, but it was also a way to learn how to build and publish a Chrome extension.
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#38A bit tangential, here's a few unix utils you can use to inspect text: `vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format `cat -e`: Display non-printing characters and display a dollar sign (`$') at the end of each line. `hexdump -c`: Display the input offset in hexadecimal, followed by sixteen space-separated, three column, space-filled, characters of input data per line. `od -a`: Output named characters.
Is `hexdump` not `xxd`?
And on Debian it's called `hd`.
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#39It's starting to seem like the universe has some fundamental order for things that we can escape temporarily, but that are inescapable in the long run. 1. Photo and video evidence was a game-changer for establishing facts and chronologies. As we've seen, it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish fake photos and videos from real. It's not a stretch to predict a time when we'll only be able to make probabilistic s…
> ... the "natural state" is one where word-of-mouth and first-hand accounts are the most authoritative evidence we can have (other than physical evidence like DNA left behind) First-hand accounts aren't always reliable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony
Neither is DNA for that matter.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...
Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters
#40A bit tangential, here's a few unix utils you can use to inspect text: `vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format `cat -e`: Display non-printing characters and display a dollar sign (`$') at the end of each line. `hexdump -c`: Display the input offset in hexadecimal, followed by sixteen space-separated, three column, space-filled, characters of input data per line. `od -a`: Output named characters.
> `vis`: display non-printable characters in a visual format
Or `cat -v`, the namesake of http://cat-v.org/. :P