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This free font can trick AI scrapers into swallowing gibberish instead of your content (www.techspot.com)

submitted 1 day ago by FTonsilStones@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Most mass scrapers, on the other hand, simply grab the raw HTML underneath. ShieldFont exploits this difference through an automated process called OpenType glyph substitution.

That said, because the whole defense rests on scrapers reading code rather than screens, taking a screenshot of a shielded page and running OCR on the image can still recover the real words.

Screen readers used by blind readers also work from the code, so they read the decoys aloud. ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.

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[-] gex@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Yes, the decoy text is marked aria-hidden, so it won't be read out loud. The real text is sent to the browser encrypted, and the decryption process takes ~20 seconds, roughly the same as running ocr.

this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026

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