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Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

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Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#81

Post by Aditya_Garg »

kerkeslager wrote: post #4

I agree with other users who said that it would be nice if this happened automatically instead of on click--I think after the initial novelty wore off, I'd probably forget to click it. It might be cleaner to just strip the non-printing characters and display a number of characters stripped, similar to how ad blockers display the number of ads blocked.

I think this extension has a very specific use case, particularly that you want to leak confidential information and you don't want it to trace back to you.

As others have mentioned, I could see this being used regularly by someone who plays Eve

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#84

Post by hrktb »

sharpercoder wrote: post #50
jonahhorowitz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photographers have been begging the big camera makers (Nikon/Canon) to add cryptographic signatures to photos from their cameras for years, but so far they've resisted doing so.

This is strange, considering the competition going on in this industry.

Ca/Nikon’s main targets are people who shoot fast, a lot and publish very quickly (e.g. sport photographers) and people who will spend an awful lot of time post processing (wedding, art, commercial shootings)

I’m not sure there’s enough benefits for spending processing time, effort and resources on cryptography on any of these fronts.

Now smartphone apps taking “secure” pictures have been there for a while, for use cases like crash site photo for insurance claims for instance. They do fill the niche I think.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#85

Post by peteretep »

LVB wrote: post #45
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #18

A 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.

Further tangent: a colleague and I talked about creating a derivative of one of the programmer fonts, replacing smart/curly quotes and another such nuisances with unmistakeable indicators.

You could probably just invert any non-ASCII character, and you could probably do this programmatically over an existing font.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#87

Post by irrational »

tomerico wrote: post #7
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

It might make more sense as a clipboard filter. If you're an English speaker that doesn't often handle languages which gain from zero width characters you could just have a listener scan your clipboard for zero-width characters, silently strip them, and then re-populate the clipboard. Although I've been thinking about building a clipboard filter for Windows a lot lately, I'm getting tired of copying text to the addre…

Ctrl+shift+v pastes without formatting

That just removes formatting. zero-width characters are not formatting so they wouldn't be removed. They are as real as the letter A - you wouldn't want ctrl+shift+v to remove all A's from your text, would you?

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#88

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

Volt wrote: post #80
gkya wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nostalgic Unix nerds hating on everything that (i) was not in original Unix, or (ii) in Plan9, or (iii) not implemented by authors of these.

Cynical and disingenuous.

Bitterly invidious Lisp nerd?

(They give off rays or something ... took a cursory look to see if I was being unfair, and booom - https://www.gkayaalp.com/blog/20170206_emacs-argument.html )

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#89

Post by Flimm »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #18

A 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.

Do you have any useful commands like these that can handle multi-byte characters in UTF-8? For instance, handling the zero-width space U+200B, which in UTF-8 takes up more than one byte. I've got some custom scripts that do, I was wondering if there was already something out there.

Re: Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to reveal zero-width characters

#90

Post by ric2b »

chanz wrote: post #76
IloveHN84 wrote: post #8

What about Firefox?

You can use this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/foxreplace/?src=... Apply an autoload rule with these settings: Name: zero length replacement HTML: Output only URL: Replace: (\uFEFF|\u200B|\u200C) Type: Regular expression With: 😳

Thank you!
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