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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on "invisible?" The only invisible character I can imagine is a space. It seems like any other character either isn't invisible or doesn't exist (ie, isnt a character).

Additionally, if I copy-paste text like this are the invisible characters preserved? Are there a bunch of extra spaces somewhere?

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When students try to evade plagiarism detectors, they will swap characters like replacing spaces with nonbreaking spaces, replacing letters with lookalikes (I vs extended Cyrillic Ӏ etc), and inserting things like the invisible 'Combining Grapheme Joiner'

IMHO it isn't a feasible way of watermarking text though - as someone would promptly come up with a website that undid such substitutions.

> IMHO it isn't a feasible way of watermarking text though - as someone would promptly come up with a website that undid such substitutions.

It doesn't matter since there's no one-pass solution to counterfeiting.

You have the right of it-- the best you can hope for is adding more complexity to the product, which adds steps to their workflow and increases the chances of the counterfeiter overlooking any particular detail that you know to look for.

There's a bunch of different "spaces", one is a "zero-width space" which isn't visible but still gets copied with the text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space

And the second site students will go to is zerospaceremover.com or whatever will show up to strip the junk.

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