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My high school english classes would upload any papers students wrote to a site that would check for plagiarism. I figured out that if I inserted random zero-wi
by christiangenco 4y ago
My high school english classes would upload any papers students wrote to a site that would check for plagiarism. I figured out that if I inserted random zero-width no-break spaces in the middle of words my plagiarism score would drop to zero.
Presumably the plagiarism system was just looking for exact matches of long substrings.
- donatj 4y agoInteresting. You could presumably also swap out characters for homoglyphs at random.
- mr337 4y agoWow, this is pretty nifty and I would, nor would the program authors thing of that use case :D
- frabjoused 4y agoThe original creator of the first zero width space had to be evil.
- throwaway290 4y agoIt has uses in typesetting, e.g. for allowing a word to be broken.
- Doxin 4y agoSo what's the point of a zero width nonbreaking space then? seeing as that also exists.
- throwaway290 4y agoUsed e.g. to avoid awkward linebreaks
- Doxin 4y agoYou can surely also use no character at all to replace a zero width nonbreaking space for that use case though, or am I missing some subtlety here?
- benj111 4y agoSomewhere someone is adding long lines of BOMs just so if someone else adds long lines of BOMs it gets flagged as plagiarism. I hope it returns the copied string. String "" is plagiarised