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This free font can trick AI scrapers into swallowing gibberish instead of your content (www.techspot.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 23 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Protection through obfuscation is not real protection. This has been an ongoing thing in the security world and is especially relevant for software. All obfuscation does is protect you from script kiddies (which AI isnt) and make the actual process slower for legitimate users. Like all DRM it only really hurts the people legitimately using your software.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    This isn't about securing sites or content. It is just for poisoning the data AI scrapers steal by obfuscating the readily accessible information.

    If you read the article or the ShieldFont website, it works pretty well when you use their React widget, even from an accessibility stand point.

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