These just in from a friend:
...
thetileapp
... take this
FONT and shove it !
The first is for all the (other) gear-heads here who have been
wanting to build this for a decade or more now. The high-tech
version of
"the
Clapper" . Does anyone (admit to) have one of these?
Didn't they also make a small version for your keyring with
audible response to help you find lost keys? Or was that another
"only available on TV" item?
There is a new breed of creature in the digital swamp... maybe
they should shape these like leeches because they will start being
found attached to everything and anything of presumed value.
And the "amber alert" for a stolen bicycle is just too funny in a
sad kinda way.
The second is an entertaining, if ultimately lame, attempt at
security by obscurity. It is hard to imagine that 20 contractors
to contractors to the NSA didn't write an OCR algorithm on Spec
the day these fonts came out?
My favorite form of encryption/information theoretic elements is
Steganography
which *hides* a message within a message, adding a bit of
misdirection to the obfuscation. The last font described is a
weak form of that and/or of simple alphabetic substitution (N=26-M
roughly).
I wouldn't be surprised if there was not an open-source solution
based on Haar Wavelets and OpenCV... It is really only a matter of
"training" in a case like this... and a fairly small symbol set.
I hope it is used as a protest-Font rather than seducing anyone
into thinking it would actually defeat anything but the most lame
cryptographer.
- Steve
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