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mimic

[ab]using Unicode to create tragedy

Introduction

monster

mimic provokes:

  • fun
  • frustration
  • curiosity
  • murderous rage

It's inspired by this terrible idea floating around:

MT: Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error

— Peter Ritchie (@peterritchie) November 16, 2014
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

There are many more characters in the Unicode character set that look, to some extent or another, like others – homoglyphs. Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homoglyphs.

Fun games to play with mimic:

  • Pipe some source code through and see if you can find all of the problems
  • Pipe someone else's source code through without telling them
  • Be fired, and then killed

Results

Observe the mayhem:

some bad code "BUT WHY?"

Or, if you've been mimicked a little harder,

some worse code

Discussion

People have noticed how terrible this is.

SlashDot

Reddit

ycombinator

BoingBoing

The Register

Further Reading

mimic wiki