Loading iOS fonts dynamically | Hacker News Reader

Loading iOS fonts dynamically

marco.org

36 pointsmh_13 comments

Probably the most important point of this article is to read the licenses on fonts you buy. Here's the popular Pictos icon font license: http://pictos.cc/font-license

> Use, or allowing anyone else to use any of the Assets to create pornographic, fraudulent, obscene, immoral, infringing, illegal, blasphemous or defamatory material.

Can't use Pictos on a porn site, apparently.

You have to store the key with the data. These contracts are silly. :(

Font designers are not security experts, just as the music and movie industry are also not security experts. There's just as high of a chance that these fonts are already posted to torrent sites, too.

At least with custom/designer fonts, they're not really designed to have mass-market appeal, but instead cater to having a few high-end, high-price customers. So trying to protect them, even ineffectively, makes a little more sense: the number of people inconvenienced for a given amount of item sales is far less than on a movie.

But yes, it's pointless.

It only prevents casual piracy, where someone fairly non-technical opens the bundle and copies the original file out.

Reverse-engineering the encryption is of course possible but much harder.

Not really. Casual pirates grab it off The Pirate Bay or similar where it's already in cleartext.

Opening an iOS app bundle and copying a file out is already out of reach of a non-technical person.

True. But I am certainly technical enough to do it, while I have no chance of breaking a coded decryption routine.

The same is basically true of any non-phoning-home copy protection scheme though. It is crackable, but it's a barrier. After all, the game is not to make the data impossible to get to. It's to make it more work to get to the data than the data is worth.

Ouch. We implemented a JS font loader a-la Google Web Fonts because we thought we can't load fonts in UIWebView other than via @font-face.

We need to keep repeating this basic fact to people who think this kind of thing serves a purpose:

"Reducing the number of people" who can access your precious content without your permission is stupid, because it only takes ONE person. He will readily share it with the rest of the world -- and probably already has.

OTOH, if people have to go through a trained technical person to pirate something, that's a weak spot that can be attacked via DMCA or lawsuits.

Pirated fonts aren't precious content.

Speaking of loading fonts dynamically- the site looks absolutely atrocious while loading (on Chrome, anyway). I reloaded the page multiple times before it finished loading because I thought there was a rendering bug.

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