privacy font

[silicon_toad2000]

http://www.abine.com/blog/2013/zxx-privacy-font/

Graphic designer Sang Mun introduced a privacy font to thwart the NSA this week, called ZXX.

The font has several styles, the most promising of which is called False. False hides its true message in tiny letters scattered inside big letters. In theory, text scanners would only pick up the big letters, and thus nonsense text, while the real words go undetected.

We downloaded the ZXX font pack and wrote out the message “This is what privacy looks like” using it below:



On his website, Mun writes:

This physical, mental, and technological growing invasion of privacy and surveillance dehumanizes us. The militarization of cyberspace must stop. If not, it’s only a matter of time before we live in a Tectologic Orwellian Society. . . This project will not fully solve the problems we are facing now, but hopefully will raise some peculiar questions.

We need more people out there like Mun thinking creatively about how to fix this whole “lack of privacy” problem. It’s multi-faceted, and it’s going to take work from people in a lot of different fields–design, law, engineering, politics, and more–to improve things.

[WhiteLightningX]

Cool. It should include background static as well, and numbers though. Humans are quite intelligent beings. Poor machines don't have a chance when humans do a leap in thought that doesn't follow its rules of logic, and I doubt there are any machines capable(im sure they are capable in the sense of computing power, coding and logic following patterns is a different story) of following quick or odd sprouts. This is common problem involving AI when trying to speak to a human. It must not only keep up with the immediate conversation, but also keep up with where that conversation is going.. And even though the sheer amount of data mining is crazy in size, it still requires a human to look at it. Granted, in the realm of law enforcement, it is prob a good thing to quickly deduce who the murderer was of a crime scene if say you noticed that the only other cell phone the victim contacted prior to the murder was the murderer's phone, and then using that info to track the murderers current location in real time. However this kind of data mining when used IMPROPERLY IS A BIG DEAL, so i'd say good job to Sang Mun. Innocent people don't need the Gov breathing down their neck and hiding in their closet and under their bed all the darn time if its not ABSOLUTELY necessary. The majority of the crap they are keeping up with is kind of ridiculous, i could honestly bet that 99% of everything they have is not needed, and the few legal cases it helps, probably could have been found out without the information. So it is a hard argument. It can be a really good thing, but it can also be a bad thing just as easily.

[Bluey_412]

Very soon, a machine would recognise and translate it with ease: Z=a, Y=b, X=c, W=d, V=e and so-on.

Not hard to run thru a translator, unless an algorithm of some kind changes the 'big' letters to have different 'small' letters embodied, say every paragrapho, or some arbitrary point, such as every 250 letters...

[DaBees-Knees]

The best of luck to any agency that wants to monitor my email. Hopefully, it will bore them to death.