Most mass scrapers, on the other hand, simply grab the raw HTML underneath. ShieldFont exploits this difference through an automated process called OpenType glyph substitution.
That said, because the whole defense rests on scrapers reading code rather than screens, taking a screenshot of a shielded page and running OCR on the image can still recover the real words.
Screen readers used by blind readers also work from the code, so they read the decoys aloud. ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.
does this also block blind people who depend on an e-reader?
Per the article, yes:
Screen readers used by blind readers also work from the code, so they read the decoys aloud.
But:
ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.
ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.
AI scrappers will just pretend to be screen readers then.
And if the approach becomes popular they will just OCR the text instead.
AI scrappers will just pretend to be screen readers then
There’s a fair chance they’re already doing that. It provides better insight on the content, less formatting to handle, and even visual stuff gets text alternatives.
It is also very easy to detect surprising text by looking at the perplexity levels by feeding it to a very small model. If there’s a problem, OCR/‘screen read’ it instead…
screen reader, SEO, indexation, in page search, etc.
Basically, it breaks everything except people… unless they block/substitute fonts for accessibility reasons, in which case fuck people too.
This is a terrible idea, and it won’t even achieve it’s original “purpose” as it is trivially detectable. Only negatives in this.
Yes, the decoy text is marked aria-hidden, so it won’t be read out loud. The real text is sent to the browser encrypted, and the decryption process takes ~20 seconds, roughly the same as running ocr.
it does, unless the reader has an OCR mode of sorts
Presumably the AI scraper would also have OCR, and would sidestep things like this?
A scraper has many more ways around something like sheildfont than just OCR. The question will be if it was actually programmed to check for such measures.
DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.
I bet you could even get some foaming-at-the-mouth anti-AI activists to endorse Israel’s right to resist if Israel decides to ban all AI. Worth a thought, Bibi.
What a laughable strawman from a coglover. On the contrary LLM lovers will happily give money to techbro oligarchs who directly supports Trump and Israel. They will also eagerly burn down the planet just for the sake of some sloppy code.
If this gets any adoption, it will work for about a week, after which scrapers will just detect the font, and do a reverse lookup of its mapping table.
Ironic that the repo of the font is also AI slop. If the author had asked any competent person how viable the solution is, instead of a sycophantic AI, they would have just gotten a laugh instead.
Thinking more about it, even if the mapping would be generated dynamically (let’s say you could generate them secretly on your server), the scraper could just parse the font file and reverse lookup the words.
And if you ask an AI to be critical, it’ll also tell you why this is useless lol.
My thoughts exactly. And so the arms race continues.
Nah. Gregg Shorthand Anniversary Edition is practically indecipherable to AI.
It uses human intuition heavily.
A terrible idea that will hinder everyone and not serve it’s original purpose in a flash.
- anything that parse the page is broken, this includes screen reader, but also indexing, searching, and people that replace fonts locally for accessibility or other reasons
- the “solution” for accessibility is pure trash
- it can be trivially detected and reversed. I suspect LLM would be incredibly better at adapting to this than anything done manually too
It’s basically a kid playing with “encrypshun” client-side, giving both the cipher and the key to the client and hoping it’ll work. Or, as other put it, DRM that don’t work for any of its original purpose, but create an additional layer of complexity and missing features, a common trend in modern projects.
Speaking of flash, serving your content in Flash keeps scrapers at bay
/hj don’t do that, it does work though!
I want to follow that project. The only thing that I don’t like is how heavily reliant the person who runs the github is on AI-gen
Normally, I don’t really care about it because I know that it’s something that is just a part of the industry now, but they’re using it even on their responses to people on the issue requests, and it’s to the point where it’s hurting my head trying to read it due to how drawn out and detailed it ends up being.
It’s really hard to follow along a project where something as simple as someone opening an issue about how it doesn’t work with screen readers turns into a multi paragraph essay about the project and possibilities on how it works.
JUST USE ANUBIS
When is Anubis useful (eg vs CloudFlare)? The GitHub page doesn’t say much-
In most cases, you should not need this and can probably get by using Cloudflare to protect a given origin. However, for circumstances where you can’t or won’t use Cloudflare, Anubis is there for you.
lol anus bi
(love Anubis, have it fronting my client’s websites)
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If the underlying text says one thing but the font makes it appear to say something else, which version does the author own the copyright to?
The human readable text. Copyright applies to the actual content not to how it’s stored or encoded.
Download from where?
Probably starts with https://
they really cooked with that video, got me more excited than with most trailers
Someone needs to tell Sxan about this
Learn shorthand. AI can’t read it. Gregg Shorthand Anniversary Edition is practically indecipherable to AI. And it allows you to write at up to 300 wpm.
If it were to become popular enough, AI would learn.
The problem with that is that shorthand relies a lot on abbreviations: B = Be or By. But, at the end of a word, it can be ble, like tab. J can be J, or -age. A uses a single dot. So does -ing.
Because of that, I’m curious whether it would catch on or not.
