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ShieldFont - a new approach to combating scrapers (shieldfont.org)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Very interesting video if you scroll down their page a short distance.

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[–] 23 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I don't know if this is this is the same font that was going around before buy accessibility advocates quickly flagged it didn't work with screen readers. Logically if a screenreader can read to a human, a scrapper would be able to read it. So this approach is probably a non starter.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I've seen lots of objection to this font from accessibility advocates...if you go to the website, however, it seems like they've accounted for screenreaders. It seems like a lot of people go straight to shouting down this technology without looking into it. That said, I have no idea how this tech works, how screen readers work, or whether these two things are compatible, just saying maybe read their webpage before getting all up in arms.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The advocates im referencing use screen readers and were unable to use sites with it. maybe this is a different solution that can some how account for that.

    I still don't see how a scrapper wouldn't just use the same screen reader content as their input though. If a machine can read the content, why would we expect another machine not to read the content?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It's said in the screenshot. To get the screen reader-accessible text, you need to press a specific button (instructions are displayed before the scrambled text), and then your browser will be computing some complicated puzzle for a few seconds in order to "unscramble" the text

    This puzzle is computationally expensive, so while it doesn't fully protect against bots, it drives the cost of scraping way up. And since this scraping is done to somehow profit from it, driving the cost up is definitely a deterrent

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    What if you have a plug in that make the font more readable. I.e. change all text dislexic friendly fonts. I guess you can turn it off but your then asking users to turn off features they find useful.

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