Doublespeak
If you’ve ever seen the Quirkology videos on YouTube, you will likely already know how to perform some cool tricks that look like real magic. You can train your fingers to be flexible, find out how optical illusions work, and learn how to deflect viewer’s attention from things you don’t want to reveal. So how about some open source magic then? Look, I can mirror R to Я, or N to И! This joke is easy as long as most of the text you read on your screen is encoded in 8-bit Unicode symbols or UTF-8, which also contains Cyrillic characters. There’s also another feature in Unicode that makes it possible to create Doublespeak, the hero of this review. It is unprintable characters, specifically extra space, joiner, non-joiner and extra non-breaking spaces. Each of the four has zero width, which means you can’t s ee it. Doublespeak is a simple demo web page made using HTML, CSS and Javascript, where you can add secret text messages to any visible text and then use it as a form of steganography.
The page has few input fields that can help you encode your text with a secret message, and then copy it to the clipboard, and another block to decipher previously encoded text. It really looks like magic, because secret messages survive further copying and pasting between almost any third-party applications, as well as on different operating systems.
The only thing you can notice is that the cipher text occupies more bytes. Doublespeak uses a base-4 numeral system also known as quaternary to encode data, therefore the secret text would need four times as many bytes than the same text in regular UTF-8. As a result, you may notice that your message, when saved as a text file, has a suspiciously large size.
But the chances that someone will check each text snippet from, say, a chat window for hidden words, are very small. Use it to challenge your friends or otherwise for the sake of goodness. Doublespeak will help you do cool tricks, so it’s worth adding it to your bookmarks.
“Add secret text to visible text, then use it as steganography”