Scrambler Notes
Frequently Asked Questions:
- Which is that English University that made the research?
- Apparently none, there are only reports of when this e-mail started to spread around Internet.
- Do you know who send it in the first place?
- Of course not, only the person that send it in the first place know that.
- Does this really work all the time?
- According to my own experience making this page, no, it doesn't work all the time. At least not as described in the original text, here I use a highly tuned script to increase readability of certain words.
- Which are the changes to the teory that you made in order to increase readibility?
- Long words keep their 2 first and last letters, I don't scramble really long words(+30 characters) and I use Levenshtein distance to ensure that long words(+9 characters) doesn't scramble more than 40% percent.
- Does this have a practical application?
- Well, it can be used as a proof of the concept that we don't read
letters, we read entire words. As people on fast reading courses always said.
Maybe they could found a place for this on their books.
- It can be used to write automated spam that bypass spam filters, I know it isn't a good thing but nuclear energy also has his bad side.
- Some people has been saying that it can be used to implement Captcha's style Turing tests. Well this doesn't seem too wrong, captchas has been a criticized because visual impaired persons can't read those curly images, and this kind of stuffs well implemented could replace them.
- Have fun!, since when having fun isn't a practical use? Send scrambled e-mails to your friends, write articles in your blog or print scrambled texts and post them all over your school or workplace.
- If you found other practical (or not so practical) uses send me an e-mail, and I'll add it to this page.
- It can be used to write automated spam that bypass spam filters, I know it isn't a good thing but nuclear energy also has his bad side.
- You love OpenSource software why don't you release it as GPL?
- You can have it if you really want it, just send me an e-mail.
- But before you think about making your own scrambling page let me tell you that this is an ongoing 'kind-of-research' and split forces doesn't help anyone.
- If you are going to make a WordPress pluggin by example I don't see any problem. But another scrambling page will only make it harder to improve the script because there will not be enough people to test it and send me bugs and readability reports.
- I could make a CVS and add developers, but it's a really small code. you better send me the suggestions by e-mail. If what you suggest is really big (like my plan of scrambling online pages) then I will send you the code.
- And yes, is GPL, I just wanted to make my point clear.
- But before you think about making your own scrambling page let me tell you that this is an ongoing 'kind-of-research' and split forces doesn't help anyone.
- Does your question isn't here?
- Send an e-mail to levhita.
Changes & Releases Notes:
Version 0.3 - (29/01/2006):
There is a thing named Levenshtein Distance, a number that tell me how much a string needs to be changed in order to become in another one. Well I'm using that concept to ensure that longer words doesn't change too much(40% is the limit right now), keeping them really readable.
Also super longer words like "supercalifragilisticoespialidoso" that refuses to get a lower that 40% levhenstein distance are send to the output without any change.
You didn't knew but Text Scrambler only scramble alphabetic characters, and tries to maintain dots and hyphens in their place. This is hard work and there was a bug in texts like "yo lo subí..." where the output was something like this "Yo lo sub...í" there where two errors actually, a) it didn't recognizes 'í' as an alphabetic character and b) it reversed the order of the dots.
Now both of them are fixed. The special character I added where: [á-ú], [Á-Ú], ñ and Ñ. If there are more characters you would like to be added send me please send me an e-mail.
Version 0.2 - (28/01/2006):
I found the next text in " Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey"
Randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon. Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
Plus a comment made by rleonmx in Cofradia.org saying that 9 or more character's words can't be readed easily, made me add a new function. Now this words keep their 2 first and last characters in order, increasing readibility a lot.
I'm starting to think about really long words like "supercalifragilisticoespialidoso", and also compound words like "superman", or hypen separated words. All of them cause nothing but problems rigth now.
I don't know how to increase readibility on them, without lossing the scrabling effect. Any idea? if you have it please send me an e-mail.
Version 0.1 - (27/01/2006):
Text scrambler is out, now you can enjoy scrambling texts. use it in your mails, blogs and websites, use it even in your IM. enjoy it !
While you do that please let me know from any bugs and stuffs, if you use it in your website please make a link to this page, soo more people can have fun scrambling texts.
Text Scrambler does a pretty good job scrambling plain text, but you can't expect that it scramble HTML code or something like that(by now).
By the way, I'm using an iso-8859-1 encoding I don't know how that could affect
users with other encodings, soo please let me know about issues with that
