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Zero-width characters are invisible, ‘non-printing’ characters that are not displayed by the majority of applications. For example, I’ve inserted 10 zero-width spaces into this sentence, can you tell? (Hint: paste the sentence into Diff Checker to see the locations of the characters!). These characters can be used to ‘fingerprint’ text for certain users.
Well, the original reason isn’t too exciting. A few years ago I was a member of a team that participated in competitive tournaments across a variety of video games. This team had a private message board, used to post important announcements amongst other things. Eventually these announcements would appear elsewhere on the web, posted to mock the team and more significantly; ensuring the message board was redundant for sharing confidential information and tactics.
The security of the site seemed pretty tight so the theory was that a logged-in user was simply copying the announcement and posting it elsewhere. I created a script that allowed the team to invisibly fingerprint each announcement with the username of the user it is being displayed to.
I saw a lot of interest in zero-width characters from a recent post by Zach Aysan so I thought I’d publish this method here along with an interactive demo to share with everyone. The code examples have been updated to use modern JavaScript but the overall logic is the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:28PM (5 children)
A person may take offense at perfectly legal behavior, leak, and think himself a whistleblower. Suppose you are in the Marines, and you find out that you're about to attack an enemy camp. Oh, that is killing! So you reveal the plans to the world and call yourself a whistleblower. Um, no.
Another person may be, in part, a whistleblower, but that is insignificant. For example, suppose the NSA is misbehaving, and so you indiscriminately leak out all the NSA documents you can get your hands on. To then claim to be a whistleblower is pretty damn dishonest.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:02PM (3 children)
Not a whistleblower, merely a hero for damaging the system.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Friday April 06 2018, @01:56AM (2 children)
Call it any way you like, but Snowden is just another wiseguy traitor -- and a DISGRACE. He gave serious information to China and Russia -- believe me, he's President Putin's best buddy -- and should be executed. Make no mistake, he is no hero. In fact he is a coward who should come back & face justice. When our country was great do you know what we did to traitors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @02:30AM (1 child)
> When our country was great do you know what we did to traitors?
Started calling them "the Founding Fathers"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @06:13AM
I thought the term was "The Honorable", cause we had to try to guilt-trip them into not doing too much damage with the authority we were vesting in them.... as we can never seem to get the idea "none of the above" is an acceptable answer to a poll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:48PM
Much like how governments want to compromise encryption and hence everyone for the sake of the "children" and because "terrorists"?
Yea, pretty damn dishonest, but its the fucking status quo.