Genius Defender

This is a small text processing tool for PHP which renders text unreadable to Genius.com web annotations. It works by randomly adding invisible characters that confuse computers but can't be seen by humans. The original text is not modified.

WordPress

The included wp-genius-defender.php file allows WordPress to load this tool in the form of a plugin; just upload the contents of this directory to your wp-content/plugins/ folder. The plugin will scramble the text in the content body whenever a single post or page is viewed, but it will not do anything to indexes, archives, and feeds. If you aren't using WordPress, feel free to delete this file.

Very Important Questions

Please review the extensive release notes.

Usage

// include the tool
require_once('genius-defender.php');

// create a new text scrambler
$scrambler = new GeniusDefender;

// scramble a string that contains only Unicode text
$scrambled_text = $scrambler->string($text_content);

// scramble a string that contains HTML tags which you'd like to preserve
$scrambled_html = $scrambler->html($html_content);

Requirements

• PHP 5.3.6 or higher

Notes

• Code execution is okay since string processing is pretty fast in PHP, but your pages will take longer to load because of all the extra characters being added. This tool completely breaks at around a million words, but is totally usable for anything under a few thousand.

• The html() method may pad whitespace characters like spaces and newlines if they occur in between HTML tags. If this is a problem, you'll need to make sure the HTML string being scrambled doesn't include whitespace between adjacent tags, such as line breaks separating paragraphs and divs.