Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

Comments

• nathan@piefed.alphapuggle.dev ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Unfortunately this destroys accessibility and should not be used

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  • undefinedTruth@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It does work with screen readers but their solution seems far from ideal. Also, that relies on the fact that the scrappers don’t typically run JavaScript.

    Screen readers (used, for example, by people with visual impairment) work from the source code, where your words are already swapped. The font only fixes things on screen, so a shielded block would be read aloud as fluent, wrong English. Shielded sections in our React tier carry aria-hidden to stop that. In its place, an opt-in beta ships the correct text encrypted in the page. A button only screen readers reach asks the reader’s browser to solve for the key: a chain of steps where each one needs the answer to the last. It also needs JavaScript, which most scrapers never run. The cost currently lands on the reader: up to twenty seconds on a slow device. That is friction, and it is the part we most want help fixing.

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    • FUZZY_QWERTY@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Go further down the rabbit hole.

      Next step: after analyzing the bundle a scraper then runs as a narrator, capturing the audio and transcribing it for ingestion.

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• terranoid@lemmy.cafe ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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• Schwim@lemmy.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If this were ever to become widespread, I imagine the scrapers would just start pulling the css file to decrypt the text.

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  • undefinedTruth@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Pretty much, yeah.

    The font must be sent to the browser so it can display the original words. Anyone who downloads it can therefore inspect it and work out the substitutions. That is unavoidable. But our goal is not to stop someone who deliberately targets a specific site. Instead, it is designed to disrupt large-scale automated scraping, which processes many sites without examining each one individually (because that costs money). ShieldFont currently ships with three different word mappings and gives publishers the tools to create their own, so decoding one mapping does not automatically reveal the others.

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• CubitOom@infosec.pub ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Can I use this to drop tables in public?

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• buran@lemmy.today ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Excuse me but I don’t get how or why this works.

  Can someone explain to me how does this work?

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  • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s explained in the article, with examples. Which specific aspect(s) of this explanation do you need help with?

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    • buran@lemmy.today ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Mostly about the glyph substitution.

      I get that it takes some combination to replace them to words and make the text incoherent, but I don’t get how it’s configured or how the AI can’t get a coherent text. I would get it if it was OCR, but scrapping?

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