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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Explanation for non-native English speakers:

Guvf fgbel vf jevggra hfvat n frevrf bs Ratyvfu jbeqf naq svkrq cuenfrf gung abeznyyl bayl bpphe va n artngvir sbez, arire va n cbfvgvir sbez. Ubjrire, gur nhgube gerngf nyy bs gurz nf univat cbfvgvir sbezf gung jbhyq zrna gur bccbfvgr bs gur artngvir sbez. Guvf vf fhecevfvat naq shaal, ng yrnfg sbe angvir fcrnxref jub unir arire frra gur cbfvgvir sbezf orsber naq znl unir gb fgbc naq guvax nobhg jung gurl jbhyq gurbergvpnyyl zrna.

Rknzcyr: abaqrfpevcg (glcvpny, trarevp, beqvanel), qvfneenl (pbashfvba, punbf) → qrfpevcg (erznexnoyr, rkgenbeqvanel), neenl (beqre). Gur ynggre gjb jbeqf ner abeznyyl arire hfrq guvf jnl va cenpgvpr.

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Rarely have I see ROT13 in the wild. A surprisingly sipid and not at all nocuous way of earthing spoilers.

If you double rot 13, they'll never crack it!

They won't even try to crack it!

Unfortunately, it only makes sense to use with this type of crowd. I can't imagine it'd be that useful for spoilers in other groups that don't have easy access to a ROT13 encoder.

EDIT: BTW, is there another ROT13 encoder in a typical linux installation besides vim's g? command or emacs's rot13* commands?

EDIT2: Looks like the most practical one is:

  tr 'A-Za-z' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m'

More common with HTML is to set the text to the same color as the background which allows you to see it when you highlight. (Which is probably easier in general.)

I see a lot more ROT13 text on Twitter when people want to make comments about recently released media.

What good is a ROT13 encoder? They would need a ROT13 decoder.

Same exact thing...

To the people downvoting: 13 is half 26. If you Rot13 "encode" something twice it ends up with the cleartext.

Try it here if you don't believe me: https://rot13.com/

I think the downvotes are because that's the joke.

If they're joking. I'm still on the fence on that.

The thing with text is that you can't really hear the sarcastic tone of voice, and people are so varied, it's believable that one isn't aware, as at least one user has mentioned here[1]. It's always best to just append an /s or a :P or something.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25461026

There's plenty of online dencoders (i just abbreviated de+encoding as its the same when shifting by 13 either to the left or right with an alphabet of 26 characters). Not everyone recognizes rot-xx though.

    ⏵ rot13

    Command 'rot13' not found, but can be installed with:

    sudo apt install bsdgames  # version 2.17-28build1, or
    sudo apt install hxtools   # version 20200126-1build1

rot13 executables not available in all distros apparently. In Archlinux, bsd-games has caesar to which you can pass 13 as an argument, though.

I'd think pretty much everyone has access to https://rot13.com/

On Ubuntu or Debian I make a habit of installing the bsdgames package, which includes rot13 among other things.

Also caesar, which is quite good at decrypting arbitrary transposition ciphers.

bash function:

  rot13 () { tr [A-Za-z] [N-ZA-Mn-za-m]; }

There's lots of bookmarklets. I just tried the one from https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/pagedata.html in Firefox, worked fine.

This comment is much funnier if you pretend it's not rot13.

Works with my 'rot18' decoder too.

'rot13' only works with the alphabet. 'rot18' can do the same thing with numbers too, so rot13 + rot5 = rot18.

Pointless trying to obfuscate info if you can still see the numbers part 'en clair' to give the game away. (bank PINs, phone numbers, etc) Need to obfuscate the digits too.

Thank you so much. I had troubles understanding the original but this makes it perfectly clear bar couple of errors.

Put this stine state into https://rot13.com/

BTW Never noticed before, but because 13*2 = 26, rot13 is both encoder and decoder.

> rot13 is both encoder and decoder

Hence its popularity for very light obfuscation!

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