FOfoobuzzHN·Feb 13, 2025
10 years ago I made a POC for smuggling arbitrary data through _no visible text at all_: https://github.com/foobuzz/ium
In Smuggling arbitrary data through an emojifoobuzz
ium
Python2016–2025
foobuzz / ium
ium
Invisible Unicode Messages
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
26GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Invisible Unicode Messages
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-05-14 13:52:20 UTC to 2025-02-13 09:05:11 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesWhitespace is good, but with Unicode you can do even better by using invisible characters such as ZERO WIDTH SPACE (U+200B) and ZERO WIDTH JOINER (U+200D). I once made a proof of concept[1] using those two characters. It can converts arbitrary data into invisible text by using U+200B as bit 0 and U+200D as bit 1.
Most platforms (Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News) accepts those characters so you can paste invisible messages there. The illusion falls down as soon as you use a low-level text editor such as vim which marks exotic characters in a specific manner (by displaying their hexadecimal codepoint, as it happens). This is where whitespace can be more powerful, given its mainstream usage
Read the rest
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[1] https://github.com/foobuzz/ium