this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Technology

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Surely these types of tools are unneeded since all the big tech companies all definitely follow the law!

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[–] buran@lemmy.today 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Excuse me but I don't get how or why this works.

Can someone explain to me how does this work?

[–] DdCno1@beehaw.org 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's explained in the article, with examples. Which specific aspect(s) of this explanation do you need help with?

[–] buran@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Mostly about the glyph substitution.

I get that it takes some combination to replace them to words and make the text incoherent, but I don't get how it's configured or how the AI can't get a coherent text. I would get it if it was OCR, but scrapping?

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 6 days ago

Imagine if you converted a p to an l and a c, but used styling to make those two letters look like a p

Same idea... The actual letters on the page are wrong, but when they're rendered back into pixels through the browser they look correct. OCR and humans would be able to read this fine, but AI tools usually fetch the raw page and strip out the unimportant bits to save tokens

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Apparently, and I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, the AI scrapers gather their data from the page source rather than from what we users see on the screen. The text in the page source when using this font will appear to be gibberish. When the font is applied, the glyph substitution occurring between the source and the browser, the text is transformed into the author's intended verbiage for the user to read.

[–] Routhinator@startrek.website 3 points 6 days ago

But more simple than that. If I'm not mistaken this is simply a font where A is mapped to P and B to V and so on. The fonts we use all are saved by the comp as character codes. Fonts are just a map of glyphs.

Wingdings is the mist famous and oldest case of a font where any letter typed comes out as something completely different.

So they have mapped a font where the letters are jumbled, and used the map with a script to encode the pages content to the same cypher. Loading the page with anything but the font that draws the intended letter instead of the letter that is verbatim on the page results in garbage.