Posts Tagged ‘Unicode’

Yet another email hiding technique?

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

While exploring browser-supported Unicode characters, I noticed that apart from the usual @ and . (dot), there was another character that resembled an @ sign (0xFF20 or @) and various characters that resembled a period (I think 0×2024 or ․ is closer, but feel free to argue).

I’m wondering, if one could use this as another way of email hiding. It’s almost as easy as the foo [at] bar [dot] com technique, with the advantage of being far less common (I’ve never seen it before, so there’s a high chance that spambot developers haven’t either) and I think that the end result is more easily understood by newbies. To encode foo@bar.com this way, we’d use (in an html page):

foo@bar․com

and the result is: foo@bar․com

I used that technique on the ligatweet page. Of course, if many people start using it, I guess spambot developers will notice, so it won’t be a good idea any more. However, for some reason I don’t think it will ever become that mainstream :P

By the way, if you’re interested in other ways of email hiding, here’s an extensive article on the subject that I came across after a quick googlesearch (to see if somebody else came up with this first — I didn’t find anything).

Exploring browser-supported Unicode characters and a tweet shortening experiment

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

I recently wanted to post something on twitter that was just slightly over the 140 chars limit and I didn’t want to shorten it by cutting off characters (some lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” that expressed a particular thought I had at the moment — it would be barbaric to alter Roger Waters’ lyrics in any way, wouldn’t it? ;-) ). I always knew there were some ligatures and digraphs in the Unicode table, so I thought that these might be used to shorten tweets, not only that particular one of course, but any tweet. So I wrote a small script (warning: very rough around the edges) to explore the Unicode characters that browsers supported, find the replacement pairs and build the tweet shortening script (I even thought of a name for it: ligatweet, LOL I was never good at naming). (more…)