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Invisible characters in a specific bit-pattern. Pretty common steganographic technique, really.
by merlincorey 3y ago
Invisible characters in a specific bit-pattern.
Pretty common steganographic technique, really.
- philipov 3y agoSo, all I have to do is copy-paste it into a text editor with remove-all-formatting to circumvent that?
- nonethewiser 3y agoCan you elaborate on "invisible?" The only invisible character I can imagine is a space. It seems like any other character either isn't invisible or doesn't exist (ie, isnt a character). Additionally, if I copy-paste text like this are the invisible characters preserved? Are there a bunch of extra spaces somewhere?
- lucasmullens 3y agoThere's a bunch of different "spaces", one is a "zero-width space" which isn't visible but still gets copied with the text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space
- pixl97 3y agoAnd the second site students will go to is zerospaceremover.com or whatever will show up to strip the junk.
- michaelt 3y agoWhen students try to evade plagiarism detectors, they will swap characters like replacing spaces with nonbreaking spaces, replacing letters with lookalikes (I vs extended Cyrillic Ӏ etc), and inserting things like the invisible 'Combining Grapheme Joiner' IMHO it isn't a feasible way of watermarking text though - as someone would promptly come up with a website that undid such substitutions.
- jstarfish 3y ago> IMHO it isn't a feasible way of watermarking text though - as someone would promptly come up with a website that undid such substitutions. It doesn't matter since there's no one-pass solution to counterfeiting. You have the right of it-- the best you can hope for is adding more complexity to the product, which adds steps to their workflow and increases the chances of the counterfeiter overlooking any particular detail that you know to look for.