sliceofcake / garbletext

JavaScript script to replace all alphanumeric text on a webpage with parallel garbled text

GarbleText

JavaScript script to replace all alphanumeric text on a webpage with parallel garbled text

Required:
L> Web browser
L> Access to the webpage that you want to garble

Garbling text
(1) Navigate to the webpage that you want to garble the text of.
(2) Open your browser's JavaScript Console for that page.
(3) Paste in the text from garble.js and run it.

[see the JavaScript Console Help section of https://github.com/sliceofcake/TechnicalHelp]

Use case
I want to give a presentation in which I will be showing a screen capture of a webpage. I want to talk about the layout of the page, but the page has some potentially confidential text on it that I don't want my audience to see. I don't mind that they'll still be able to see letter-count for words or positioning of digits, I feel that it's good enough that the text is garbled while still retaining its general appearance. I'll run this script on the webpage that I want to show, then I'll take screencaps of the garbled webpage to include in my presentation.

Security Note
This script intentionally keeps the general structure of the text. For most cases, this is safe, and for most cases, this is what you want. However, you're more-or-less playing a game of Wheel of Fortune with your audience, as the pattern "A'a Aaaaa" could be reasonably back-converted to "I'm Ready", since there aren't that many combinations that could fit that description. If you had the result of a Yes/No vote on the webpage, it would be fairly obvious that the pattern "Aaa" was "Yes" and the pattern "Aa" was "No". For critically confidential text, you need to take more serious measures to protect the original text, at the cost of appearances.

Completeness Note
There are many ways of putting text on a webpage. You can include text through dynamically-generated images, the CSS "content" property, the HTML input "placeholder" property, and other ways. This script will address standard cases, and may not cover every case, for complexity reasons. Please always review the result of the garbling before using the garbled page further.