Alienizer

Alienizer is a character substitution tool: It replaces Latin letters with characters from other writing systems — depending on the settings, the changes may be barely noticeable or clearly visible.

What Happens

The Latin alphabet shares its forms with many other scripts. A Cyrillic "а" (U+0430) and a Latin "a" look identical — but they are two different characters from two different cultures. A Greek "ο" and an Armenian "ο" are very similar; a Georgian "ო" already looks somewhat different. And of course there are characters like the Devanagari म, the Ethiopic ም, or the Adlam 𞤃 — all carrying the same sound but visually occupying entirely different dimensions.

Alienizer exploits these so-called homoglyphs in script: The program searches the entire Unicode character space — over 150,000 encoded characters from more than 150 writing systems — for characters that resemble a Latin letter (or carry the same sound, more on that below), ranks them by degree of similarity to the source text, and substitutes accordingly.

The substitution of Latin letters with visually similar equivalents is also the basis of the IDN homograph attack, in which deceptively authentic domain names are registered for phishing. Alienizer uses this same mechanism not for deception, but to call into question the apparent stability of the relationship between sound and sign, word and meaning — in an era increasingly shaped by machine-generated text.

What You Can Do With It