Yesterday I said that I wanted to take this 4th of July week to address the concept of Liberty. I got several excellent suggestions for topics but some of them were more focused on the roots of the Independence movement. Today, we face different threats to our Liberty that are an outgrowth of how we communicate.
Some have taken on the invasive and ubiquitous governmental data collections and begun to develop new means to counter those efforts. One of these innovations is a disruptive typeface called ZXX after the Library of Congress trigraph for “No linguistic content; Not applicable.”
While I don’t agree with the sentiment (there are more appropriate ways to raise awareness of criminal acts than compromising loads of classified information) of the example in the image above, it does give a good idea of what ZXX looks like in use.
In a recent post on Walker Art Center’s Gradient Blog, Developer Sang Mun (himself a former NSA contractor) said, “I drew six different cuts (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise and Xed) to generate endless permutations, each font designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way. I offered the typeface as a free download in hopes that as many people as possible would use it.”
I’d call this a practical design project. While it can be a pain to read, it would seem to fool OCR systems. Given the scope of ZXX’s applicability, it’s worth considering whether its use is practical. But ultimately, the question is, would an early adopter flag himself through its use? Interestingly, there was a time in the not so recent past when only criminals would feel the need to conceal their communications so. Now, more and more, the average citizen is asking himself whether the Government is reading his mail.
For more info on ZXX visit z-x-x.org
