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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • TLDR:

    This study mainly targets Pinyin input, the most popular Chinese input method (hence 1bn potentially affected).

    Vulnerabilities were due to the keyboards’ use of the cloud for dictionaries used in IMEs (essentially a conversion engine). Such IMEs are must-haves for certain languages and converts A-Zs to other scripts. Lack of E2EE resulted in exposed keystrokes.


    Personally I would recommend switching to something which uses a local dictionary. RIME is a good FOSS alternative and can be configured to work on Android via fcitx.

    While the study doesn’t cover English keyboards, this is as good a reminder as any not to use in-built dictionaries in general unless you have to.



  • Intel’s Clear Sans.

    IBM’s Plex, I’m particularly partial to their condensed sans.

    Fira Sans is a good generic recommendation, their mono is again worth considering.

    Adobe’s Source family (sans, serif, mono) is another inoffensive, safe choice.

    erewhon is a modern workhorse serif that pairs well with all the sans fonts above. It’s derived from Adobe’s Utopia, which is used in quite a few newspapers (clear and legible without taking too much space).

    STIX Two was specifically designed to replace Times New Roman in scientific + mathematical publications, if you’re looking for a font that’s different but familiar to Times New Roman, I could not recommend it enough.

    Charis SIL was originally designed for laser printers and later modified for use in linguistics, it’s essentially a serif version of Verdana (same designer too). As with all the other fonts mentioned, very broad character set support.

    The TeX font catalogue is a treasure trove in general.

    Edit: almost forgot, the Libertinus family also comes recommended for a more ‘professional’ look.