I was making a video for alsi, a screenshot information tool for Arch Linux, and the first line of its copyright statement comes with this:


# Copyright (C) 2010-2013 Trizen <echo dHJpemVueEBnbWFpbC5jb20K | base64 -d>.

A year ago, I had an idea of using CSS to obscure, which I considered quite cute way to hide from email scavengers. But this base64 method is geeky, I wonder why I had never thought about it, putting a base64-encoded email address like this alsi.

So, this would be mine:


# Copyright (C) 2014 Yu-Jie Lin <echo bGl2aWJldHRlckBnbWFpbC5jb20= | base64 -d>

If you ain’t familiar with base64 command—which I doubt, you just run


echo -n john@example.com | base64

I think even without giving the entire commands for decoding, just base64-encoded string should do fine, I believe most coders would be able to recognize it and execute the right command to get the email address.

The truth is I don’t put email address in the statement, it’s not because that I feared my email address would be collected by spammers, but I can’t be 100% sure I’d be using the same email address a decade later.

But with this method, whether I’d do it or not, this looks so cool for sure:


# Copyright (C) 2014 Yu-Jie Lin <bGl2aWJldHRlckBnbWFpbC5jb20=>