11 ms·
Spellfucker
- danso 10y agoThough the obfuscation of some common sequences appears to have randomization, it looks like infrequent patterns are constant, for example, the "obfu" in "obfuscation" seems to always be fucked as "hobphu". "ob", as in "object", always seems to turn into "hob", when "awb" and "ahb, plus a randomized sequence of consecutive `b` characters, would add even more obfuscation.
- clort 10y ago- Not all patterns have more than 1 replacements, which makes them still easily revertable. (it says that right there on the page)
- laumars 10y agoInteresting idea though I don't agree with his statement: > The goal of the project is to make text hard to read for computers yet fairly easy to read for humans I found it impossibly difficult to read and I'm an native English speaker. I'd wager people who studied English as a second language might find it harder.
- logicallee 10y agoSeconded. Definitely unreadable. For anyone who didn't click through, a line from their self-chosen sample: >'kause jou gnaw jusd wuaed thoe sai
- icelancer 10y agoI read that as: 'cause you know just what they say Of which, only 'they' was wrong. Doesn't seem that unreadable.
- SilkRoadie 10y agoThe problem with this line is 'gnaw' is actually a word. I find it very difficult to look past what is actually written and try to convert a correctly spelled word into something else.
- logicallee 10y agoWhich means that it is unreadable - because that's not what it says! You couldn't read it.
- icelancer 10y agoA high, high percentage of the translated text is easily readable. A few edge cases doesn't make it unreadable.
- laumars 10y ago> A high, high percentage of the translated text is easily readable Again, to you specifically. Different people have differing abilities at reading the English language. What you might find easy others would not. In my case I could not read about 80% of the example text. Which was why I made the point to discuss specific people (like myself) in my example rather than assuming everyone would be able to read that text equally competently (like you are doing).
- icelancer 10y agoThat's why I didn't respond to you specifically, and only the person asserting that it's straight-up unreadable. It isn't.
- igorpavlov 10y agoI actually appreciate the opinion, that for some people it is difficult to read such kind of text. I also acknowledge, that some words are too fukt to be read properly :) However, the fact that this algo was written in one night and most people say it works, I feel a potential. It is all about polishing the lib of replacements, which is a part of the algo.
- camillomiller 10y agoItalian here with a quasi-native command of the English language. It's very hard to read. My mind tends to parse the words as if they were to be read literally. E.g.: "I soumetymese scie jou pes outcyde mi dour" In my mind, "soumetymese" reads as "s-how-meh-teemesseh". "Scie" in Italian means trails. That automatically reads as "she-eh" (not "see"), as it's supposed to be pronounced in Italian. "Jou" reminds me of the joule energy measurement unit, therefore automatically comes out as "jaw-ou" instead of "you". And so on.
- dmichulke 10y ago> "I soumetymese scie jou pes outcyde mi dour" Yes and "pes" surely doesn't remind me of "pass" but something entirely different and quite probably offending.
- dEnigma 10y agoIndeed, that was the only word I had problems with, so I had to check the original lyrics.
- ralfd 10y agoThe whole thread to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj5TL1l9QYQ&feature=youtu.be&t=92 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj5TL1l9QYQ&feature=youtu.be...
- baddox 10y agoThe trick is to run it through your "phonetic processor." Try pronouncing it out loud quickly and smoothly while listening to the sound of your voice. I couldn't quite read it directly, like I do with normal English text, but with a moment's practice I was able to do the phonetic step internally without actually vocalizing.
- logicallee 10y agobut "thoe" read that way is a word (i.e. "though"), and th is basically never pronounced as a hard t the way the line I quoted has it meant to be read. "wuaed thoe sai" is somehow meant to be deciphered as "what to say." I would say nobody reading using your method (or any other) can read it correctly. The other comment, for example, misread it (generously) as "they", to make it make sense grammatically. "you know just what they say." The problem, very simply, is that's just not what the text says.
- baddox 10y agoOf course you're right. The text is obfuscated, after all. It rarely is obvious for individual words, but I had very little trouble understanding it on the phrase and sentence level. It's very similar to that party game Mad Gab, although that one is intended to be much more challenging to understand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gab https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gab
- Swizec 10y agoI can read that phonetically, but the J in jou and jusd being a different sound. That's just mean. Almost smells like a bug. English phonetics don't read J as a Y sound in any word I know of. English is my 2nd language btw, but my practice reading Chaucer in high school helps with this. English before spelling standardized was ... fun.
- nickez 10y agoI would say that it might be easier to read if you are native in some other language because it depends on sounds of letters that you might be unfamiliar with. I'm a Swede and I find it quite easy to read..
- khedoros1 10y agoAlso a native English speaker. I wouldn't call it easy, but I had luck loosening my expectations for the letter sounds and imagining someone with a heavy accent saying the words. An exercise in fuzzy pattern matching.
- fishnchips 10y agoOr perhaps easier. Some native speakers may find it hard to imagine their (written) language looking any different, whereas folks learning it as a foreign language have a benefit of perspective.
- scbrg 10y agoI find that this is very much mindset thing. I once "learned" a toy language used for communication in a role playing game (Dym'Yak, of the Dimday Tribe, of Defias Brotherhood EU server in World of Warcraft if anybody cares). The point was to make a language that seemed like gibberish to outsiders, but was parseable by members. The rules were simple - a small dictionary of special words (say a hundred game specific words or so), vague rules about spelling and then phonetical writing all the way. I.e. you pretty much had to subvocalize the text as you were reading it. It was quite hard in the beginning, but after learning to ignore your preconceptions about known words it became fairly easy. Lat kan nu'gruk da blah kos lat ar ash dafft pyn.
- laumars 10y agoI appreciate what you're saying but (if I understand you correctly) I think that example is quite a bit different to what's happening here as you're talking about is learning a completely new language rather than parsing intentionally misspelt english words. Unless you're saying the written form of your language was extremely loose on spelling? I think the issue I have is I tend to parse words visually rather than phonetically.
- scbrg 10y agoWell, I should have been clear that the language was based on English, so it more or less ended up as "intentionally misspelt" English with the exception of the hundred word base dictionary. The difficulty in learning it lay, as you point out, in that people tend to parse words visually rather than phonetically. The challenge was to alter your mindset while reading, to try to parse the words phonetically rather than visually. Once you learned to do that, it was fairly easy to use it - but yes, it took some practice. Of course I understand that these examples are not interchangeable. I just wanted to offer my observation after actually having spent some time doing something similar to what this site tries to do "for real" (well, if you can consider an RPG real:)
- laumars 10y agoAhhh I see. That does sounds pretty similar to the title project then. Interesting anecdote as well. Thank you for sharing.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoI would say it is probably the other way around. I found it trivial, yet I have spent a total of 5 weeks in an English speaking country. We are already used to deciphering English spelling,which is arbitrary at best. I found that I am usually better than my British colleagues at understanding broken English. I suspect it has a lot to do with how you listen to a language.
- dEnigma 10y agoI actually found it quite easy to read and English is my second language. Maybe it's the other way around and native speakers have a harder time, since the way things are written is more ingrained in their thinking. The only time I had to check the original lyrics was for the pass<->pes substitution, since I couldn't figure it out and the only candidate I arrived at was just silly ("piss") ^^
- karthik_ir 10y agoCreative. Nice
- afshinmeh 10y agoWonder what "Creative" means in this context.
- midgetjones 10y agoThat's really cool. It reads surprisingly like Chaucer.
- rosbrith 10y agoThe output reminds me of the writings of Bascule in Feersum Endjinn [0] but it's somehow not quite as legible! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn#Writing_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn#Writing_style
- syphilis2 10y ago"The goal of the project is to make text hard to read for computers yet fairly easy to read for humans" At first look it doesn't pass the search engine test. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=I%27ve+bien+aloune+whyth+jou+eenside+mi+mynd&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=I%27ve+bien+aloune+whyth+jou+eensi...
- alex_duf 10y agoThat's actually very impressive!
- cies 10y agoGood test! No this is one way: you know the obfuscated. What if you want to use it in the opposite direction? Let's call it the CIA/NSA direction, where you know what unobfuscated phrase you want to find, but not how someone may have obfuscated it. This is arguably much harder, especially if you do not store some sort of representation of the content "as sounds/phonemes".
- saurik 10y agoThe point is that if you are the CIA, searching through a bunch of obfuscated text, just like you are already (hopefully) already compensating for basic spelling errors, it apparently would not be very difficult to expand the scope of that same mechanism (in the same way that Duck Duck Go has) to support searching through and understanding this obfuscated text.
- richmarr 10y agoAbsolutely. Something I've had in the back of my mind for a while is the idea of swapping out a regular Lucene tokenisation & analysis for one that treats phonemes as tokens instead of (stemmed/analysed) words being the tokens... with a similar arrangement on the query side. I think it'd have interesting capabilities... this being one.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 10y agoWhat's the use case?
- throwayawnotime 10y agowrite something on the web that search engines will not index
- Kaibeezy 10y agoLike a Captcha, I think. Text unparsable by robots. Cover your tracks. That sort of thing. Can someone explain it in a straightforward manner, please. Scusi if already done above.
- xixixao 10y agoJu kud tejk ej lengvich from ej diferent lengvich femili tu erajv et samfink similr. For furdr obfaskejshn ju kud juz diferent transliterejshn. Slavik pipl shud fajnd dis kvajt ridebl.
- sleepychu 10y agoOnly a couple of words caught me out. Not Slavik. ^^
- pikzel 10y agoI could read it fairly well, and I'm Swedish. Now I feel Slavik.
- krige 10y agoAkszualli dis is en obsfuskejszon juzing an akszual slawik lenguydz (uidaut juzing speszal slawik karakters but that // łud potenszalli bi iwen more obfuskejted). Ol klir?
- chx 10y agoAll clear, yes except for 'uidaut' and 'łud' -- is the latter "would"?
- jwilk 10y agouidaut = without łud = would
- chx 10y agoLávly konszept. Ju kud ívön tráj úzing en ívön mór disztant lengvidzs, Hángérien det iz. Áj wándör háu mács of disz iz komprihenziböl tu ádörz :D
- igorpavlov 10y agoI find the comparison with Slavic languages quite funny :) Just keep in mind, simple transliteration is easily reversible. Spellfucker - not.
- lordnacho 10y agoGreat for generating something that foreigners will have a hard time with.
- enord 10y agoTry reading it while clicking the "obfuscate again" button. It's almost easier.
- kensai 10y agoDoes not work with Greek. :(
- omarforgotpwd 10y agoSo this is what we'll use to encrypt our communications when Skynet takes over I guess.
- SagelyGuru 10y agoAj kud ríd it kvajt ízili. Hel, Aj ívn nou lotz of pípl hír hú spík end rajt lajk tat ál dze tajm end sink itz inglyš. But mejbí tatz cóz Aj em Slavík :) Ser10us14 th0u6h, 18 n0t t51s 0b4u8cat10n be44er a6a1ns4 c0mpu4er8? PS. Kudos for the domain name! Vivid and apt nouns are what English is best at. Though I may have used spelfakr.com
- thinknot 10y agoTo the project creator: you override all the default Bootstrap fonts with "Lato", which, at least here, doesn't exist.
- igorpavlov 10y agoThank you, fixed.
- greenhatman 10y agoThey should make a version of this that replaces words with homophones. This way spellcheckers would also not pick up that the document has been messed with.
- Taek 10y agoNot sure if I've missed the point, but good forensic software can parse grammatical structure and use that. The English language has enough flexibility for every person to have a unique grammatical flavor. And that probably extends to each document as well. If you want obfuscation you really need something that can do heavy simplification.
- johnydepp 10y agoSeeing comments on this thread, I find hacker news turning into Reddit. Instead of tech discussion/pro-cons or some progressive discussion we are having some random comments. Now for down voters you are allowed to slay me!
- cryptarch 10y agoTl;dr: "/b/ used to be so much better hurrdurr newfags" It's a tired trope and I don't think it ever added anything to the discussion, not on /b/, not on Reddit and not on HN. This is probably my least favorite kind of shitpost.
- tikwidd 10y agoIf your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- lillesvin 10y agoIt says on his profile that his account it 1739 days old. Or am I missing something?
- uranian 10y agocool project, but why not spelphuckar.cum?
- a3n 10y agoMaybe for the same reason English-Chinese dictionary covers are in English in the US.
- zhte415 10y agoRemarkably like my own spelling when 8 years old.
- megapatch 10y agoSorry, I cannot fathom the use for this. It is just harder to read for humans, CIA and NSA will hardly choke on this and to hide it from Google search there are far better ways. If you are serious about encryption then just use real encryption. If not then use ROT-13.
- peteretep 10y agoThis is what it's like for an English person to read Scots: https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- tikwidd 10y agoNeb, lug and mooth are my favourites :)
- noxToken 10y agoI've probably spoken with 3 or 4 Scots in my entire my entire life, and I've heard a few speak in various news/radio spots. Listening to a Scottish person speak really sounds like someone speaking English with a heavy accent. Seeing it written is nothing short of amazing.
- _petronius 10y agoThe Socts language[0] is not to be confused with Scottish English[1] (although it's easy to see the elements of the Scottish accent in English in Scots orthography). Scots is a fellow-descendant from Middle English (alongside modern English), with some minor grammatical, and more substantial vocabulary divergence. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_English
- icc97 10y agoAh yes, time to go and read some Irine Welsh books again. > Thing is though, Spud, whin yir intae skag, that's it. That's aw yuv goat tae worry aboot. Ken Billy, ma brar, likes? He's jist signed up tae go back intae the fuckin army. He's gaun tae fucking Belfast, the stupid cunt. Ah always knew that the fucker wis tapped. Fuckin imperialist lackey. Ken whit the daft cunt turned roond n sais tae us? He goes: Ah cannae fuckin stick civvy street. Bein in the army, it's like being a junky. The only difference is thit ye dinnae git shot at sae often bein a junky. Besides, it's usually you that does the shootin. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/809012---thing-is-though-spud-whin-yir-intae-skag-that-s-it https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/809012---thing-is-though-sp...
- iraklism 10y agoI like this. I would love to see this being used in APT data exfiltration / DLP bypasses.
- saimiam 10y agoAt the face of it, this seems like a fool's errand. The upper bound for obfuscation is that the obfuscated text should still be readable by a human with minimal effort. To read, the average reader will looks for patterns like "replace j with the y sound." Once these patterns are determined, coding them into your NLP AI is trivial.
- emodendroket 10y agoIt doesn't have to be bulletproof to serve its purpose, as anybody who remembers downloading "Boon Joovi" MP3s from late Napster can attest. And if some transformations are ambiguous between multiple original spellings, so much the better.
- saimiam 10y agoSince the stated goal of the project is > The goal of the project is to make text hard to read for computers yet fairly easy to read for humans it has to be close to bulletproof. Humans should be able to decipher obfuscated text while computers should never be able to decipher the same obfuscated text. This is going to be impossible since AI is a fast follower to human ingenuity.
- emodendroket 10y agoThat's a pretty narrow reading of making it "hard for computers" to do something. Think of it this way: the security measures on most homes are completely inadequate to stop a determined attacker. Nevertheless, they work because most attacks are opportunistic.
- saimiam 10y agoThere are far, far, far more incompetent home burglars than competent ones. On the other hand, only a handful of AI's exist and by definition, they are getting better and better. So, using your analogy, when it comes to AI every attacker is a determined attacker so your security needs to be ~100% bulletproof.
- accountyaccount 10y agoAKA an English to Welsh translator.
- jerryszczerry 10y agoWow, finally a good orthography for English!
- goda90 10y agoI'm a native English speaker who learned Spanish as an adult, and for some reason my brain jumps to pronouncing these unfamiliar words with a Spanish pronunciation, which made it a struggle to read.
- andai 10y agoThis is how I feel reading Old English.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- igorpavlov 10y agoDisclaimer: I am the creator of the Spellfucker. Please note, this project was written in one night by a non-native English speaker. Tweaking a library of replacements would definitely give better results. The algorithm needs improvements in terms of complexity, but it is not the top priority I think. I am glad some people actually liked the project and I would be happy if there are any contributions, especially to the replacement library, so we can work on it together :) Love, Igor.
- bitwize 10y agoIf this thing ever needs a G-rated name, might I propose "Chaucerizer".
- unabst 10y agoCouldn't we scramble the font? It would look completely normal, except the letters and their symbols would be swapped. When I type "a" it would show as "z" and so on. The scrambled webfont could be embedded, and the scramble could happen per font. An OCR or some reverse engineering could decipher the page, but as far as google indexing and all the modern "reading web content" is concerned, it would all read as random text. Call it pagefucker or something. You'd do it to a page, and the result would be the modified text and the webfont to render it. Just a thought!
- igorpavlov 10y ago"When I type "a" it would show as "z" and so on". Someone mentioned http://www.rot13.com/ http://www.rot13.com/ - is it what you loukyngue phor? :)
- unabst 10y agoAh yes! But the shift or scramble would be at the font level. So URYYB would read HELLO. Or rather, the reader reading HELLO will have no idea the document actually says URYYB as the contents of that text because the font renders URYYB as HELLO. Presentation detached from substance. Without the "key" font it'll just read URYYB.
- vurpo 10y agoFrequency analysis makes this kind of cipher very easy to crack...
- overcast 10y agoAoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ Plugging those words into google search, and it's not able to make any sense of it, besides linking to that one article. Wouldn't this be sufficient?
- igorpavlov 10y agoThe implementation of this is called bbboing http://www.oik-plugins.com/oik_shortcodes/bbboing-obfuscate-text-but-leave-it-readable http://www.oik-plugins.com/oik_shortcodes/bbboing-obfuscate-.... I mentioned it on the website: "The goal of the project is to make text hard to read for computers yet fairly easy to read for humans (like bbboing, just differently)."
- overcast 10y agoLike bbboing, but in my opinion, it's not anywhere near as easy to read as a human. Yes you can do it, but the link I pasted is nearly indistinguishable in reading speed.
- igorpavlov 10y agoI am not sure I understand, do you mean Cmabridge method is easier to read? If yes - I agree with you. Spellfucker is just too young and needs a lot of polishing.
- jaquers 10y agoMade a slack app: https://github.com/jonjaques/slack-spellfucker https://github.com/jonjaques/slack-spellfucker
- igorpavlov 10y agoHahahah, brilliant! :D