this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI

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51
ShieldFont - a new approach to combating scrapers (shieldfont.org)
submitted 3 days ago by Reygle@lemmy.world to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Very interesting video if you scroll down their page a short distance.

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[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Please, no, let's not do this.

Even if it wasn't made by Claude, take a moment to think about what this does to blind users and other users who rely on screen readers who disable JavaScript for whatever reason (and there are legitimate reasons).

Besides, this technique is not novel. Amazon does it to scramble their ebooks, and a random guy broke it in a couple weekends. Considering AI bros are already breaking Anubis, it's not a stretch to say they'd break this in no time flat.

Like every other DRM scheme on Earth, it harms legitimate users while doing nothing to stop the people it's supposed to stop.

[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Their site says they're friendly to screen readers, but we've got to do SOMETHING, yes?

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, legislature that bans AI bots, for starters

[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

101% with you.

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago (3 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.

[–] itsworkthatwedo@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 days ago (2 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.

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 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?

[–] RusAD@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Vandals_handle@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Hey you with a special tool to overcome difficulties, we fucked your tool and now there's an extra step for you.

You didn't even say thank you.

[–] tazeycrazy@feddit.uk 1 points 3 days 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.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 points 3 days ago

It's a complete non-starter, yes. The screen reader problem is real

[–] tazeycrazy@feddit.uk 1 points 3 days ago

If the screen reader then needs to read the pixels of the screen then you need to increase the resources required and then build an AI to read text oh no it's happening again!

[–] irq0@infosec.pub 16 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Worth noting that the linked GitHub repo is full of commits from Claude

[–] LostWanderer@fedia.io 7 points 2 days ago

I was hopeful until I saw that and ironically instructions for LLM Agents to follow. I won't be touching that with an 80 foot pole. The irony, is honestly darkly humorous.

[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I mean.. Github

But still, yucky

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

I saw headlines about this before and ignored it, but actually reading the page this time I see that it's much more sophisticated than I expected, especially the part about having a mechanism to locally unlock for accessibility with a compute cost.

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anything a screenreader can use a bot can use. Killing bots via text kills screen readers necessarily, no? How do you know a bot isnt using screen reader tech?

[–] Reygle@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Here's what they say about it.