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

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

Installation

Install from a local directory if you've cloned:

pip install -e .

Install straight from the repo:

pip install git+git://github.com/reinderien/mimic.git

Example usage

Before installation, invoke via python -m mimic. After, simply use mimic.

mimic --list           # Show all of the homoglyphs
mimic --explain=o      # What crazy things can we do with this letter?
mimic --me-harder 100  # Type some lines in and mess with every single char
mimic --reverse        # Undo the mayhem. Boooring.
cat somefile | mimic   # Pipe some source through at 1%

# Turn up the knob and save the results
cat somefile | mimic --me-harder 25 > mimicked

# Or, if your code acts strange, but you have seen this prank before:
cat mimicked | mimic --reverse > fixedfile
diff fixedfile somefile

Results

Observe the mayhem:

"BUT WHY?"

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

Solutions

vim-troll-stopper: vim plugin that alerts you by highlighting "troll" Unicode characters in red.

Discussion

People have noticed how terrible this is.

ycombinator

mbabuskov / mimic