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Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

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Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#1
Hey Hacker News! This mess⁡a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁣h⁢a⁣s⁣ ⁢a⁣ ⁢h⁠i⁠d⁣d⁢e⁢n⁢ ⁠m⁠e⁢s⁣s⁢a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁠i⁠n⁡side it called a textmark. Find out what it is at textmark.io, use the find textmark tool. We created textmark to allow you to protect your valuable content or send hidden messages to friends, the skies the limit. Just copy and paste this message into the "find textmark" box.

Re: Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#3
post #2

Cool idea. Needs a demo to show how it actually works and not just for decoding messages. Like what's the use case. Also, all those trademark symbols makes this look comically unprofessional.

Hey thanks for the feedback! Definitely will add a video shortly just putting it out there to get great feedback like yours.

Re: Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#4
Hi there, great idea. Sort of like text stenography.

Is the message really hidden in this message? Or are you just doing the lookup your database of hidden messages based on the hash of the public message?

Regarding the website UX - after I pasted the message to your text field I thought the hidden message is the youtube video. But that didn't make sense to me and only later I understood the message is above the video.

If you are interested in more UX feedback, feel free to visit https://usability.testing.exchange which is a free community platform built exactly for this purpose.

Also, looking at the payment options - I'm missing a pay-per-message approach. For your consideration.

Re: Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#5

Hi there, great idea. Sort of like text stenography. Is the message really hidden in this message? Or are you just doing the lookup your database of hidden messages based on the hash of the public message? Regarding the website UX - after I pasted the message to your text field I thought the hidden message is the youtube video. But that didn't make sense to me and only later I understood the message is above the vide…

Great feedback the message has been updated.

Re: Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#7
Interesting. Did some quick poking around.

Looks like the system adds a number of non-printing unicode characters into the string. In this thread title, for example, the textmark is stored in the phrase "mess⁡a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁣h⁢a⁣s⁣ ⁢a⁣ ⁢h⁠i⁠d⁣d⁢e⁢n⁢ ⁠m⁠e⁢s⁣s⁢a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁠i⁠n⁡side." (Thanks, textdiff!)

Specifically, it adds non-printing unicode characters repeatedly. I'd guess these form a unique series, which is mapped to a record in the textmark database.

If I wanted to automatically remove the textmark from a text, in order to steal your content, I would write a script to automatically remove any non-printing unicode characters that appear in it. This StackOverflow answer includes a script achieving precisely that task: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11598864/6226586

Re: Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#8

Interesting. Did some quick poking around. Looks like the system adds a number of non-printing unicode characters into the string. In this thread title, for example, the textmark is stored in the phrase "mess⁡a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁣h⁢a⁣s⁣ ⁢a⁣ ⁢h⁠i⁠d⁣d⁢e⁢n⁢ ⁠m⁠e⁢s⁣s⁢a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁠i⁠n⁡side." (Thanks, textdiff!) Specifically, it adds non-printing unicode characters repeatedly. I'd guess these form a unique series, which is mapped to a recor…

Also, this reminds me of a Clara Labs (YC S14) project to hide unique IDs in unicode text: https://blog.claralabs.com/invisible-ink-a-simple-but-faulty...

Re: Show HN: Add hidden messages to your tweets, Facebook posts, WORD docs and more

#10

Interesting. Did some quick poking around. Looks like the system adds a number of non-printing unicode characters into the string. In this thread title, for example, the textmark is stored in the phrase "mess⁡a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁣h⁢a⁣s⁣ ⁢a⁣ ⁢h⁠i⁠d⁣d⁢e⁢n⁢ ⁠m⁠e⁢s⁣s⁢a⁠g⁣e⁣ ⁠i⁠n⁡side." (Thanks, textdiff!) Specifically, it adds non-printing unicode characters repeatedly. I'd guess these form a unique series, which is mapped to a recor…

I was thinking the same things like you. Looks like they don't event hide the actual message. They basically hide some sort of ID that points a row in the database. After some research I've made a web-app which can hide any message into any text.

If you wanna look it's on G⁡⁠⁢⁠⁠⁢⁠⁣⁠itHub. Here are the links.

Demo: https://ozgrozer.github.io/titus/

Source: https://github.com/ozgrozer/titus/