This article was published on April 28, 2017

Spellfucker screws up your spelling to outsmart and confuse web bots


Spellfucker screws up your spelling to outsmart and confuse web bots

Spellfucker is a new text obfuscating tool that changes the input text into coherent gibberish that humans can make sense of, but not computers. This means it would make it more difficult for bots to exploit information about you, for example, targeting ads based on what you type.

There’s already some other apps out there with similar functions, like Text Obfuscator and Bbboing, but most of them are quite easily reversible which can make it easier for pesky AI to figure out.

Bbboing, for eaxlmpe, outeabcsfs the txet by kpieneg the frsit and lsat letter in ecah wrod the smae, wlihe rniizoadnmg the rset. Alaeptpnry, rrseceah has sohwn taht it’s engouh for hmnuas to hvae the frsit and lsat ltteer in the ceocrrt place to be albe to raed. But it’s way too smplie to fool our mhnaice olverrods.

That’s why Spellfucker tries to bring text obfuscation to the next level, by randomizing replacements to make reverting processes more difficult. You can obfuscate any text a number of times and get new results. And according to Spellfucker’s creators, the cool thing is that the text is still readable — although that might be debatable.

Ees eet ectuali easi phar khumense thoe wread a thexed thad khaz bien spelphucked?

The project is still in experimental status so users shouldn’t rely too heavily on it as a way to bypass non-human readers. At the moment not all patterns have more than one replacement and the algorithm is far from being fully optimized when it comes to performance. 

Also, Spellfucker’s creators admit that some words are still difficult to understand — but you can be the judge of that. If you’re interested in helping Spellfucker stick it to the machines then you can contribute to the code on Github.

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