by imurray on 4/11/12, 2:52 PM
[EDIT: I assume the main point was to make documents readable, but hard to copy. My comment is about breaking this trivial copy protection scheme. I see that other comments read the purpose of the font differently.]
Given a long document, one could easily crack this Caesar substitution cipher. Of course one could also do OCR on the characters to learn the mapping.
Tangentially, these thoughts remind me of a cool Master's thesis [1] where they did basic OCR, by clustering blobs of ink and solving the Caesar substitution cipher, rather than trying to recognize the shapes of the letters! That approach can be used to adapt a real OCR system to the current document.
[1] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~scottl/research/msc_thesis.pdf
by AdleyEskridge on 4/11/12, 3:39 PM
This is a really neat demo! That said, wouldn't this be extraordinarily inaccessible to users employing screen-reading software? They'd "hear" a jumble of characters.
by jgrahamc on 4/11/12, 3:18 PM
Could be made considerably stronger by using a homophonic substitution cipher. Given that there are lots and lots of Unicode characters it would be pretty easy to flatten the distribution to make letter frequency analysis hard.
by Paul_S on 4/11/12, 3:23 PM
Is this meant for copy protecting text on the website?
If I can see it I can copy it regardless of how fun you make the process.
You'd be better off just releasing it under a license of choice. Technical means of protection are pointless.
by pbhjpbhj on 4/11/12, 3:49 PM
How about having a scrambled page and using a separate channel to distribute the font. Yes it's still just a substitution cipher but various tricks could be added to make it more interesting - you could add in steganography for example (eg by a particular font characteristic) or use a sparse font file generated for each para or have the font file as a one time pad (each cyphertext letter is replaced by a word).
by rblatz on 4/11/12, 2:48 PM
The reverse of this is actually the interesting part. Give scrambled HTML to the browser, use a font to convert it to human readable text.
Obviously this wouldn't stop anyone willing to put a bit of effort into decoding it, but I bet lyric sites start using this soon.
Edit: Apparently I was confused like several others, but came to the right conclusion anyways.
by MindTwister on 4/11/12, 1:50 PM
This would be decoded in about 5 seconds, since the first thing I'd do would be copying the text into my editor of choice...
by ecesena on 4/11/12, 3:20 PM
Apart from the utility, it's really cool! Look forward to see Vigenère cipher ;)
by themstheones on 4/11/12, 2:48 PM
I'm missing the point. Who wouldn't view source / inspect element to see the real text?
by woodall on 4/11/12, 3:20 PM
Sorry, from the comments it's apperent that this was a horrible demo.