mimic

[ab]using Unicode to create tragedy

Introduction

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:

"BUT WHY?"

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

Discussion

People have noticed how terrible this is.

SlashDot

Reddit

ycombinator

BoingBoing

The Register

Further Reading

mimic wiki