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This would be incredible for some privacy applications if you wrote a wrapper on top of it to obfuscate the class names. Clearly visible to users, very difficul

This would be incredible for some privacy applications if you wrote a wrapper on top of it to obfuscate the class names. Clearly visible to users, very difficult for bots to pick up without clearly looking for it.

KillerRabbitt 9y ago
While this may evade simple scraping bots, it's easy enough to render the page then use some type of character recognition to get the content.
- nickreese 9y ago
  I don't disagree. But the bot / tool rendering it would need to know to look for it. You could even pass around "not so hidden" messages with it. Tell your friends, add this CSS class to the body to see the message. Bulletproof, not at all. Just pointing out a clever use.
- matte_black 9y ago
  It’s fairly trivial to quickly animate each letter or stroke to flicker at a random high speed interval so anytime a render captures a screenshot you get garbled incomprehensible text.
ajross 9y ago
Honestly, there are much better tricks for steganography if that's what you want. The very fact that this renders as human-readable text with a standard web browser pokes a huge hole in the problem of keeping it secret.
- nickreese 9y ago
  I don't disagree. This just reminds me of a very "gray hat" SEO project I dabbled with 8-9 years ago. Back then we were grabbing dropped domains and rebuilding them in masse to harvest the search traffic and build an early "PBN." Not wanting to leave an obvious footprint for Google or having to build a ton of templates, we randomized everything. From generating logos on the fly to randomizing the html structure and css classes names an extra precaution. The sites were ugly as sin, but since Google wasn't rendering CSS on every crawl it didn't matter. Pair this with our monetization strategy that made extensive use of css's `content=""` to place large CTAs across different sites and this project reminds me of the lessons we learned back then. Needless to say, this isn't a project I'm super proud of, but when I saw how non-accessible this CSS font was, I couldn't help but think about scrambling the class names as well.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    That’s not "gray hat", that’s entirely black hat, utterly immoral, and purely malicious. And honestly, we as society should do anything to eliminate people doing this.
    - nickreese 9y ago
      Well that went from 0-60 in no time. Society has much larger fish to fry. No one was harmed in this endeavor. Sure it "polluted the web" and was against Google's guidelines, but we definitely weren't hacking or doing other true "black hat" things. Ultimately it was shut down in 2012 and in the entire time I was involved in this 2 people requested their domain back and we sent it their way no questions asked. Content was generated with our internal equivalent of a markov chain, so there wasn't content piracy either. Sure, this project added no value to the web and we should have spent our time building an awesome service that generated links naturally... but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        > Society has much larger fish to fry. I wish I had a dime everytime someone used this justification.
      - entropie 9y ago
        Great and interesting comments anyway. As much I would call me a white hat, I guess most of us have done we're not proud of in the past. I for one used to work a very short time at a small dating portal that used like any available way to get users to pay.
      - tudorw 9y ago
        thanks for sharing this, it's good to know what's out there, hope you have found a vocation :)
    - matte_black 9y ago
      Virgil led Dante down into the next layer of Hell, past the rapists, murderers and thieves. “And here...” he gestured “...is where they torture people who place CTAs in a css content=“

KillerRabbitt 9y ago

While this may evade simple scraping bots, it's easy enough to render the page then use some type of character recognition to get the content.

nickreese 9y ago
I don't disagree. But the bot / tool rendering it would need to know to look for it. You could even pass around "not so hidden" messages with it. Tell your friends, add this CSS class to the body to see the message. Bulletproof, not at all. Just pointing out a clever use.
matte_black 9y ago
It’s fairly trivial to quickly animate each letter or stroke to flicker at a random high speed interval so anytime a render captures a screenshot you get garbled incomprehensible text.

ajross 9y ago

Honestly, there are much better tricks for steganography if that's what you want. The very fact that this renders as human-readable text with a standard web browser pokes a huge hole in the problem of keeping it secret.

nickreese 9y ago
I don't disagree. This just reminds me of a very "gray hat" SEO project I dabbled with 8-9 years ago. Back then we were grabbing dropped domains and rebuilding them in masse to harvest the search traffic and build an early "PBN." Not wanting to leave an obvious footprint for Google or having to build a ton of templates, we randomized everything. From generating logos on the fly to randomizing the html structure and css classes names an extra precaution. The sites were ugly as sin, but since Google wasn't rendering CSS on every crawl it didn't matter. Pair this with our monetization strategy that made extensive use of css's `content=""` to place large CTAs across different sites and this project reminds me of the lessons we learned back then. Needless to say, this isn't a project I'm super proud of, but when I saw how non-accessible this CSS font was, I couldn't help but think about scrambling the class names as well.
- kuschku 9y ago
  That’s not "gray hat", that’s entirely black hat, utterly immoral, and purely malicious. And honestly, we as society should do anything to eliminate people doing this.
  - nickreese 9y ago
    Well that went from 0-60 in no time. Society has much larger fish to fry. No one was harmed in this endeavor. Sure it "polluted the web" and was against Google's guidelines, but we definitely weren't hacking or doing other true "black hat" things. Ultimately it was shut down in 2012 and in the entire time I was involved in this 2 people requested their domain back and we sent it their way no questions asked. Content was generated with our internal equivalent of a markov chain, so there wasn't content piracy either. Sure, this project added no value to the web and we should have spent our time building an awesome service that generated links naturally... but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      > Society has much larger fish to fry. I wish I had a dime everytime someone used this justification.
    - entropie 9y ago
      Great and interesting comments anyway. As much I would call me a white hat, I guess most of us have done we're not proud of in the past. I for one used to work a very short time at a small dating portal that used like any available way to get users to pay.
    - tudorw 9y ago
      thanks for sharing this, it's good to know what's out there, hope you have found a vocation :)
  - matte_black 9y ago
    Virgil led Dante down into the next layer of Hell, past the rapists, murderers and thieves. “And here...” he gestured “...is where they torture people who place CTAs in a css content=“