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Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

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Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#31

Post by javajosh »

jodrellblank wrote: post #15
Vinnl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, really all it does is change the font! And blur images that have alt texts, which supposedly can also be reversible. Probably best not to use it for classified government docs :)

In FireFox people can get a similar effect with F12 -> Style Editor -> * {font-family:wingdings !important;} Or in Chrome, F12 -> Elements -> Styles on the right -> Fight with Chrome's interface.

You could also use a "redacted" font like https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Redacted+Script.

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#32

Post by Vinnl »

enlyth wrote: post #30
tekchip wrote: post #24

Obfuscation with blur is trivial to reverse these days. Always block out leaving no pixels with which to reconstruct. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679801 https://github.com/bishopfox/unredacter

The OP's extension doesn't seem to blur things, but actually transform them into solid lines which would be impossible to reverse, the only information that is left is the relative length of the words.

Technically it also blurs images that have an alt text, for good measure, but the main feature is indeed the text transformation. But yeah, primary use case is e.g. sharing with colleagues, not protecting against nation-state actors.

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#33

Post by axelthegerman »

Vinnl wrote: post #17
nayuki wrote: post #14

This technique is also known as Greeking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking#In_computing > The term "greeking" was applied by various WYSIWYG editors of the 1980s, such as ApplixWare and Island Graphics. Greeking referred to the substitution of text with a placeholder gray bar upon moving out of focus.

I wish I'd known that; could have come up with a better name. Fun fact though.

Not too late to change no? Let's have some fun

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#34

Post by amlib »

breakingcups wrote: post #21
jodrellblank wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In FireFox people can get a similar effect with F12 -> Style Editor -> * {font-family:wingdings !important;} Or in Chrome, F12 -> Elements -> Styles on the right -> Fight with Chrome's interface.

Surely wingdings are reversible?

Maybe a font with just tofus would work... like a reverse Noto Sans. Ain't nobody gonna reverse that :)

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#35

Post by angelaguilera »

This is really nice! May I suggest an option to "deobfuscate" certain parts of the web page? For example, after you obfuscate the page with alt+shift+O, then you could click on some parts of the page to de-obfuscate them. Sometimes you want to hide only certain parts of the page while keeping others untouched (page headers/footers, titles, etc.).

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#36

Post by Doches »

Komodai wrote: post #2

No chrome?

This is maybe a bit unrelated, but it's really pretty heartwarming to see things, however small, that are Firefox-only or Firefox-first. Sure, yes, Chrome is the wildly more popular browser (and Webkit-derived browsers are essentially everything that isn't FF), but a thousand tiny cuts like this are how we break out of the browser monoculture.

Having everything be Chrome-first (and, often, Chrome-only) is how we got here in the first place. <3 to the OP for focusing on Firefox first, and putting a pebble on the right side of the scale!

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#37

Post by eatbitseveryday »

mkoryak wrote: post #6

The effect is really neat, but I would never use this for any reason. I see that there are a ton of people on that Twitter thread who love this. Good for them!

I guess we’ll never learn why you wouldn’t use it. Good for you!

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#39

Post by Vinnl »

angelaguilera wrote: post #35

This is really nice! May I suggest an option to "deobfuscate" certain parts of the web page? For example, after you obfuscate the page with alt+shift+O, then you could click on some parts of the page to de-obfuscate them. Sometimes you want to hide only certain parts of the page while keeping others untouched (page headers/footers, titles, etc.).

Yeah I'd like to have that too. Don't know yet how I'd implement it, but logged here and happy to take Merge Requests: https://gitlab.com/vincenttunru/obfuscate/-/issues/3

Re: Show HN: Firefox extension to obfuscate web page text

#40

Post by kevincox »

progbits wrote: post #3

Nice idea! Looks like spaces are preserved, and the bar lengths seem to match the world length. Is that the case? I didn't measure it precisely and didn't check the source code. If so you might want to add some random noise. Sometimes it might be possible to reconstruct parts of the text just based on the word lengths.

Yup. It would be better to just replace the text with randomly sized bars of the same number of lines. You can have fun playing with the algorithm to come up with something that looks vaguely english-like.

And the blur for images isn't great. It may be better to just use a black box there. Or maybe pick a single colour from the image or something like that.

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