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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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nervuri nervuri at disroot.org
Mon Mar 15 12:24:54 GMT 2021
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On Sun, Mar 14, 2021, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
This is technically interesting but do you suggest that Gemini be
modified in one way or the other, to limit the risks? And, if so, how?
As you note in <gemini://rawtext.club/~nervuri/stega.gmi>, it can
perfectly be done without zero-width characters. A trivial way is to
encode the hidden information in a number of ordinary spaces at the
end of each line.
Zero-width characters are *by far* the most potent way to do this - youcan encode any number of bits between any two visible characters. Theother methods are nowhere near as efficient.
As for ways to limit the risks... that's the hard part. I don't thinkit's a matter of changing Gemini. The best place to put a solution tothis problem is the OS's clipboard utility. However, browsers can helpinsofar as they can interact with the clipboard, by letting users knowwhen copied text contains zero-width characters (and perhaps homoglyphs,etc). Another approach would be to replace zero-width chars with, say,emojis (a browser extension actually does this), but it would need tohave an on/off toggle, because these characters can be used for goodreason.
The guiding principle is that users must be able to see what's going onwithin the "plain" text that they're working with. If developers pickit up and figure out solutions, that would be great.