Following on from the recent discussion [0,1] on zero-width characters and how they might be used to fingerprint messages.
chpmrc built an extension [2] to detect these characters, but as some people mentioned, the way the extension worked was less than ideal.
I decided to build a better version that works in the background and alerts the user if they have selected text containing these zero-width characters, showing a notification that allows you to copy a clean version, and a version with zero-width characters replaced by emojis.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadchpmrc built an extension [2] to detect these characters, but as some people mentioned, the way the extension worked was less than ideal.
I decided to build a better version that works in the background and alerts the user if they have selected text containing these zero-width characters, showing a notification that allows you to copy a clean version, and a version with zero-width characters replaced by emojis.
I also wrote a blog post about it [3].
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16749422
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754987
[2] - https://github.com/chpmrc/zero-width-chrome-extension
[3] - https://medium.com/@aidobreen/hidden-text-fingerprints-and-h...