A Brazilian creative studio called Seneda & Abrucio has teamed up with Playtype, a Copenhagen-based type foundry, to build something that doesn't rely on asking nicely to...

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.

  • cley_fayeEnglish
    581·
    22 hours ago

    A terrible idea that will hinder everyone and not serve it’s original purpose in a flash.

    • anything that parse the page is broken, this includes screen reader, but also indexing, searching, and people that replace fonts locally for accessibility or other reasons
    • the “solution” for accessibility is pure trash
    • it can be trivially detected and reversed. I suspect LLM would be incredibly better at adapting to this than anything done manually too

    It’s basically a kid playing with “encrypshun” client-side, giving both the cipher and the key to the client and hoping it’ll work. Or, as other put it, DRM that don’t work for any of its original purpose, but create an additional layer of complexity and missing features, a common trend in modern projects.