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Traditional Catholic Faith => General Discussion => Topic started by: Matthew on January 10, 2021, 05:38:28 PM

Title: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Matthew on January 10, 2021, 05:38:28 PM
I should have announced this earlier; apparently not everyone guessed correctly on what this is about.

I have made use of the forum software's "censored list" feature, but instead of censoring them to ***** or BLEEP, I'm simply changing them to a scrambled version of the actual word. Because I'm not looking to censor these words -- just make them unreadable to search engines and computer bots. I'm using greek and other foreign letters in such a way that the words can be easily read and understood by humans, but not machines.

To a machine, farm is spelled f-a-r-m and nothing else. I could have a whole page talking about farmers farming on their farms, but if I spell farm just ONE LETTER different, for example

fαrm (that α is the greek letter "alpha") then all software and algorithms are COMPLETELY befuddled. A text search for "farm" would return 0 results.

(And people worry about AI being "mankind's last invention -- the one that will replace/destroy us all!" don't make me laugh!  Computers aren't any smarter today than the first computer ENIAC -- the only difference is processing power. That's it. Fundamentally they have ZERO intelligence and ZERO ability to rationalize or intellege anything.)

I need to correct the so-called violation on the main page -- for "dangerous or derogatory" content -- still don't know what the heck they're talking about. Eventually I will figure it out, and I'll let you all know what the magic word was!

Thank you for your patience.

P.S.
Most websites use "keywords" in their link URLs, to help with search engine position. Unfortunately, that means the forum software is going to "break" those links when f-a-r-m is replaced with f-alpha-r-m. Again, computers require absolute precision. If you misspell 1 letter in a URL, you will get a 404 "page not found" error, because the server will be COMPLETELY befuddled. An ant is more smart than a computer.

There is no easy fix for this. My suggestion: Post the salient portion -- if not the whole article -- on CI as well as the original link. Most links are not going to get clicked, after my forum software mangles them. Users will have to manually repair the link by restoring the actual roman letters.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on January 11, 2021, 08:24:47 AM
What about Leftists   L E F T I S T S. There are those Greek letters again.

I have a brand new Dell computer with a new keyboard.

Must be Big Tech.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Geremia on January 11, 2021, 11:49:15 AM
I'm using greek and other foreign letters in such a way that the words can be easily read and understood by humans, but not machines.
This is a really annoying "feature". What's the point of it? I'm sure there are crawler bots that can decode it. Plus, it breaks pasted URLs.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: claudel on January 11, 2021, 12:47:38 PM

… I'm using Greek and other foreign letters in such a way that the words can be easily read and understood by humans, but not machines. …

[if you spell "farm"] fαrm (that α is the Greek letter "alpha"), then all software and algorithms are COMPLETELY befuddled. A text search for "farm" would return 0 results.

I have assumed for several days that the lookalike fonts were meant as stumbling blocks to thwart Establishment mischief makers, but I wasn't sure whether you used a clever algorithm to do the swaps or were doing it more or less by hand. I see now that it must be the former. My hat's off to you for devising character substitutions that don't render the text unreadable to humans.


… Computers aren't any smarter today than the first computer ENIAC -- the only difference is processing power. That's it. Fundamentally they have ZERO intelligence …

That's not what Hollywood says. Surely J. J. Abrams wouldn't lie to us!*
_________________
*FACETIOUSNESS ALERT!!
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Matthew on January 11, 2021, 12:58:45 PM
I am doing the substitutions by hand. I can improve them over time -- replacing more letters with the "originals" as it were.

All I need is a enough characters to interrupt the word, so that the word they're looking for comes up "0" on my page.

Searches aren't smart enough to put 2+2 together. "Tr", a funny character that looks like a u, then a "mp" after that. I think most computers would be totally foiled by that, and wouldn't even suspect I just named the 45th president. Most searches work like your classic CTRL+F search, where you type in a word, and the browser (etc.) tells you how many are on the page.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: claudel on January 11, 2021, 01:23:11 PM

I am doing the substitutions by hand. I can improve them over time -- replacing more letters with the "originals" as it were.

Oh, my. Doing it by hand is rather a big deal. It must take up a sizable chunk of your time, not to mention tax your patience. So thank you for shielding not just the site but also us, its users.


Searches aren't smart enough to put 2+2 together. "Tr", a funny character that looks like a u, then a "mp" after that. I think most computers would be totally foiled by that, and wouldn't even suspect I just named the 45th president. Most searches work like your classic CTRL+F search, where you type in a word, and the browser (etc.) tells you how many are on the page.

There is one way in which search algorithms have become more sophisticated: in the ability to recognize a letter with an accent even when the accent isn't included in the search, and vice versa. For example, even ten years ago, someone searching eBay for a collection of Molière's plays would have to do two searches, one on "Molière" and another on "Moliere", to cover all bases. (I remember once encountering a similar problem with "facade" and "façade".) For better or worse, those days are now in the past.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Clemens Maria on January 11, 2021, 01:31:06 PM
You can't do substitutions on urls.  If you need to hide urls from the corporate overlords at google, maybe you need to find an ad company that won't censor the content?
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Matthew on January 11, 2021, 02:45:31 PM
Oh, my. Doing it by hand is rather a big deal. It must take up a sizable chunk of your time, not to mention tax your patience. So thank you for shielding not just the site but also us, its users.
I should clarify --
I'm putting in the substitution rules by hand. I'm not manually editing each post -- that's not what I meant.
I didn't just install a plug-in or something. There is a list of rules, and each rule must be added manually. Changing this word into that word, etc.
Title: IPA also for Decorative Use/Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: AlligatorDicax on January 18, 2021, 06:00:05 PM

I have made use of the forum software's "censored list" feature, but instead of censoring them to ***** or BLEEP, I'm simply changing them to a scrambled version of the actual word. Because I'm not looking to censor these words -- just make them unreadable to search engines and computer bots. I'm using greek and other foreign letters in such a way that the words can be easily read and understood by humans, but not machines.

For at least the last few years, there's an example of using nonASCII letter glyphs [∆] in a Web-site logo, albeit in this instance, for purely decorative purposes.  Perhaps ironically, it's on a Novus-Ordo Catholic site [*]:

Quote from: Jessica Gordon: founder of CatholicCuisine site

catholic cuisine
recipes for celebrating the feasts and seasons of the liturgical year!

Her nonASCII letters, which are imbedded in the logo image, and therefore couldn't be shown in the quote above, come from periodic releases of the Unicode IPA Extensions block, up at U+0250--02AF (in UCS versions 1.00--4.00, thus the glyphs are no more recent than April 2003).  These are simply letters from the International Phonetic Alphabet that have been added to the Roman i.q. Latin Alphabet.

Whether using what is essentially a predefined table look-up of simple substitution ciphers is effective at confusing automated scanning by the increasingly aggressive outposts of cancel culture, depends on how determined they are to ensure that no "deplorable" Web sites can slip past or thro' their nets, and how much effort they put into processing of text.

--------
Note ∆ : Glyphs are specific shapes, and different glyphs can be used to represent the same letter, e.g., lower-case ‘A’ as either ‘ɑ’ or ‘a’, for which Greek ‘α’ is a human-recognizable informal substitute.  However, IPA uses the 2 l.c.-‘A’ glyphs as different letters, which in this instance, formally signify different vowel sounds, so they are not merely a single letter displayed in different fonts.  The term glyph applies to much more than just letters and digits; e.g., each graphic variation of an emoji is a distinct glyph.

Note * : I found it again at <https://catholiccuisine.blogspot.com/>.  So she hasn't been deplatformed by "blogspot".[/li][/list]
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Yeti on January 18, 2021, 08:08:05 PM
I thought the members-only threads were not visible to Google? What is the problem? Is it possible to encrypt those threads in such a way that they will be automatically decrypted when members log in and read them?
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Tallinn Trad on February 05, 2021, 12:08:24 AM
You can mess AI up pretty easily too.  For example if instead of unsubscribing from emails you report them as spam.  This requires human interaction to correct. 

AI cannot detect human subversion, awkwardness sarcasm.  Find ways to subvert the system.

My friend has been reporting local minor politicians such as council members, mayor's deputies for having illegal gatherings in their homes.  Cops show up nothing happens but it annoys those councilors and makes them understand the effect of a police state where anonymous people can accuse you.

Shows why first amendment rights matter. 

At this point, since nobody has the guts to shoot bullets, the next best thing is subversion of the system. There are lots of non violent ways to be a pain in the ass and protest the tyranny.

Many government and corporate systems assume human good will and compliance.  If they don't get it from 5 to 10% it can crash the process because they need more humans to sort it out than they can hire and train. 
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Matthew on February 05, 2021, 04:58:19 AM
You can mess AI up pretty easily too.  For example if instead of unsubscribing from emails you report them as spam.  This requires human interaction to correct.

AI cannot detect human subversion, awkwardness sarcasm.  Find ways to subvert the system.

My friend has been reporting local minor politicians such as council members, mayor's deputies for having illegal gatherings in their homes.  Cops show up nothing happens but it annoys those councilors and makes them understand the effect of a police state where αnσnymσus people can accuse you.

Shows why first amendment rights matter.

At this point, since nobody has the guts to shoot bullets, the next best thing is subversion of the system. There are lots of non violent ways to be a pain in the ass and protest the tyranny.

Many government and corporate systems assume human good will and compliance.  If they don't get it from 5 to 10% it can crash the process because they need more humans to sort it out than they can hire and train.

Exactly!

Everyone needs to resist in the strongest way they can. Even if it's just "gumming up the system" by producing lots of chaff. Make sure you KEEP a Gmail account and use it often for banal, useless stuff you couldn't care less about. Use that Gmail as an "intercom" to talk to your spouse, kids in different rooms (or buildings) of your house.

Make them work for it. Give them extra GB of data to process. Make any processing they do take more time. Every little bit helps!

And you made a GREAT point that αnσnymσus reporting is a double-edged sword. Yes, it means your neighbors can call the cops on you. But it also means you can call the cops on them! Turn the whole thing into a farcical s***-show.  That's the best way to bring it to an end.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Matthew on February 05, 2021, 05:00:56 AM
I thought the members-only threads were not visible to Google? What is the problem? Is it possible to encrypt those threads in such a way that they will be automatically decrypted when members log in and read them?

Members-only threads are not visible to Google.

The software is all-or-nothing when it comes to censoring words.

I still have to censor words, because Google scans the site at all hours of the day looking for "problems", and I can't be here 24/7. So it's simple, really.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Tallinn Trad on February 05, 2021, 09:30:12 AM
You could call the cops on yourself weeks before you had a party or "illegal" gathering.

Report yourself, cops show up several times, nothing is happening, they figure you have a trouble making neighbour reporting you and wasting their time.

Then you have your gathering.  Cops ignore it if it is reported because of the false alarms.
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Marie Teresa on February 05, 2021, 09:52:01 AM
You could call the cops on yourself weeks before you had a party or "illegal" gathering.

Report yourself, cops show up several times, nothing is happening, they figure you have a trouble making neighbour reporting you and wasting their time.

Then you have your gathering.  Cops ignore it if it is reported because of the false alarms.
How would one do this without them being able to tell who made the call?  
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: Matthew on February 05, 2021, 10:55:35 AM
How would one do this without them being able to tell who made the call?  

Um...

It's easy. The address.

The point is to report YOUR address several times, so they get used to coming to [Your Address] and each time, it's a false alarm. You can tell them it's a neighbor.

They'll get sick of coming out to [Your Address] kind of like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Then you have your gathering -- when the wolf actually shows up and kills the sheep -- and no cops will come that time, even if a neighbor DOES call the cops on an actual gathering. The cops will say "sure, sure... I come out to [Your Address] for yet another false alarm? I don't think so! Good bye!"
Title: Re: Font character changes on certain key words
Post by: RomanCatholic1953 on May 31, 2021, 06:50:04 PM
What solved most of my problems in replacing my computer mouse.