Don't Want the NSA to Read Your Documents? Use This Font.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/21/dont-want-the-nsa-to-read-your-email-use

Every little helps, right.

 

Why would anyone go through the trouble.

 

I think this is part of a trend I see arising of products/programs that are 'Prism-Proof'.

 

Encrypted email account is far more logical and stress free.

 

This is a pretty novel approach to the problem. The downfall (unless I'm mistaken) is that the recipient would also have to install this font in order to use it. Most of my acquaintances can't be bothered with such things. I'm amazed at how little they value their privacy.

@popcorn: Thanks for the link to Reason.com. It seems like my kind of website. I'm going to buy a subscription to the magazine.

 

No Worries

 

Definitely a different approach to privacy.

I personally have a hard time reading some of these fonts, and wondered whether recipients might also have similar problems -- But that sparked the thought that the recipient could simply change the font to any of various common and easily readable fonts simply by using the formatting option.

In turn I wondered whether NSA, or whoever does email monitoring, couldn't do exactly the same thing undercutting the entire security protection of this approach. The answer might be that this wouldn't happen on a routine basis because of special programming requirements for recognizing the unusual font, and then changing it -- but if that is the case then why not simply send all emails using a tiny font size too small for scanning recognition, and include a message to recipient that they need to change font size in order to read message.

In sum, these fonts don't seem particularly secure as a privacy approach; but if they are, it seems that there are easier ways to accomplish the same thing.

I must be missing something.

__

 

Lol, nice idea.

Think like a spammer, put it in a picture

 

Anyone remember the old PGP "Secure Viewer"? It opened the messsage inside a window with a 3-D looking font, to avoid TEMPEST attacks. Ah, the good old days...

PD

 

Privacy expert dismisses PRISM-busting typeface as 'art project'

 

What do you think about ZXX fonts ?

If i dont print anything , what can i do with these fonts?

http://z-x-x.org/

 

for the hell of it i wrote some text with this font into Notepad2 and then tried to grab it with ABBYY Screenshot Reader, which is an excellent optical character recognition program. ABBYY was able to read the text just fine. I tried both ZXX (regular) and ZXX Noise (shown below). but even if OCR software couldn't capture this font, I still wouldn't use it because it's butt ugly and irritating to read.

Edit: ABBYY couldn't capture ZXX Camo (second pic), so that might be an option for people worried about hidden OCR scans or something similar.

 

As long as they are PCI Compliant...

 

Yes, this is the problem. I can not convince my email contacts to bother with anything more than standard yahoo or gmail (or basic work or school email). If it takes so much work like that font, it is not practical, even if it might work which seems it would not.