What was the original purpose for these characters' design?
Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
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Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#12Where can I find a full list of zero-width characters?
It looks like there are just four: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_width
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#13What was the original purpose for these characters' design?
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#14What was the original purpose for these characters' design?
I use the zero width no break space with formatting languages to format only parts of words. Something like _rest_ful to render the first part in small caps may not work while _rest_ ful will, of course but renders as two words. Replacing the space with a zero width no break space solves that.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#15Nice to fingerprint text and avoiding that it is just copy/pasted around the web
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#16The postscript mentions a unique user ID. Ideally you'd just want a hash of the user ID, some private key, and possibly a session ID. The quick and dirty method works great for a one off though.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#17I did this (non-publicly) many years ago for my eve online alliance. A substantial problem exists in that forging the identity of _someone else_ is fairly easy in a naive scheme if someone detects these characters. That means you can sow chaos by blaming innocent folks. In practice you'll want to "sign" the inserted data as well. Also because of the overhead here and the fact that you will want the signature to occur…
> There are other, far more interesting ways, to watermark text than this that are both harder (to impossible) to detect that produce better results.
This sounds interesting, could you elaborate?
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#18I did this (non-publicly) many years ago for my eve online alliance. A substantial problem exists in that forging the identity of _someone else_ is fairly easy in a naive scheme if someone detects these characters. That means you can sow chaos by blaming innocent folks. In practice you'll want to "sign" the inserted data as well. Also because of the overhead here and the fact that you will want the signature to occur…
I saw the topic and the first thing my mind went to was eve online :)
People could still just make a screenshot and the special character would not be visible, so they implemented hidden watermarks: [0]
Then the same alliance would also generate slightly different text for each person. [1]
I think things might have changed now days, as everyone is recruiting new players and make it easy for other alliances to put spies in. Maybe in some sub-groups that manage large amounts of assets?
[0] http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?12731-Once-upon...
[1] http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?16311-Taking-th...
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#19Also be careful of copy-pasting bash commands or install instructions to your terminal, they can contain hidden zero-width malicious commands, as well as a newline at the end to make the command run immediately. Ohmyzsh on my machine detects copy-pasted text and warns you.
Re: Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text
#20How difficult would it be to write a browser extension to either remove all zero-width characters or somehow make it super obvious that they are being used on the page?
I just searched for "zero-width" and "zero width" in Chrome and Firefox's extensions stores, but didn't come up with anything.