Government backdoors and Hiding in emojis, oh my! đķ ķ ķ ķ ķ ķ Šķ
Sometimes inspiration for the coolest tricks comes from some otherwise novel things. Such seems to be the instance for this guy ( https://paulbutler.org/2025/smuggling-arbitrary-data-through-an-emoji/ ), on which post he seems to have gotten inspiration from a comment about unicode's zero width joiner features and rabbit holed until he found a fun way to copy-paste-able emojis that are hiding data in them. To do this, as he explains, he basically took to the unicode format specifications and specifically around these and emojis. Long story short, he came up with something that gives this emoji (for instance): You can also do the encoding on cyber chef as well (as seen in that picture and this next one). But it's a much more manual process. If you go check the issues page on the github, you can see this has even more people making bash and python versions of the tool. However what I wanted to mention today is that ther...