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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: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 06 2018, @07:10AM (2 children)
Which reminds me of another way this could be performed. Why use invisible characters, when you can simply use lookalike characters. Define a set of characters you think look identical (there are probably 8 ascii letters which have cyrillic lookalikes), and every time you encounter one of these, encode a bit. Bonus points for also using "fi" vs. "fi-ligature" too, which is one of my pet peeves about PDFs, normal English words get mangled into unicode monstrosties that propagate through copy/paste. Don't impose your kerning on me, which to rub shit into the wound, I also find utt-ugly, I just want the text, you know, the *portable* stuff.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday April 06 2018, @07:56AM (1 child)
Doesn't the P in PDF stand for "Painful"?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday April 06 2018, @08:41AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves