Four Fonts to Foil Google’s All-Seeing Eye

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Worried about being spied on by the "man" (Google)? Use these fonts to foil the Google Machine!

Optical character recognition, the same stuff that Google uses to scan the world’s books, can turn real, physical documents into more grist for the data mill with astonishing accuracy. Sang Mun, a designer who has previously worked with the NSA during his time in the Korean military, came up with a clever way to fight back: He made a typeface that’s unparsable to computers, but legible to human eyes.
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Only read the quote and my question is why was someone from the Korean military working for the NSA? Did I miss something?
 
Skillz said:
Only read the quote and my question is why was someone from the Korean military working for the NSA? Did I miss something?
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We cooperate with lots of allies.

Anyway, you can't fool all OCR software/hardware. Even if you could, why would we trust the NSA to give us a tool that would help secure our personal documents (potentially against them)?
 
Yea...because the only way the NSA can read all your shit is via OCR.
 
Complete waste of time, and the douchiest presentation I have seen in a long time. Guy talks about this stuff like he is Moses, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King all rolled into one.

The solution itself is worthless. If people start using these with any frequency then they will simply be integrated directly into all OCR systems and will be useless within a year. The NSA will do it much faster of course though, and if new ones start coming out they will simply work around them faster and faster until the ultimately end up automating the process so the OCR systems automatically figure out how to resolve them without human intervention.
 
too bad viemo videos always suck ass in my chrome browser and just display black screen + audio.

I was kinda interested in that too -- oh well off to play more GTA5, i banged a hooker in a back alley and then got my money back after running her over with my infernus :)
 
I agree with arentol.

The font was unreadable by standard OCR programs before he published the fonts.

Now all an OCR software writer needs to do is add the parameters for the fonts into the software since the obfuscation is the same for each character and blammo, the font can be decoded.

The font creator is a moron.
 
bbf said:
I agree with arentol.

The font was unreadable by standard OCR programs before he published the fonts.

Now all an OCR software writer needs to do is add the parameters for the fonts into the software since the obfuscation is the same for each character and blammo, the font can be decoded.

The font creator is a moron.
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But that is no longer OCR. OCR software is not pre-defined for certain font styles.

Surely one could develop a reader that will read some obfuscated text, but that's all it is, a reader of some certain known obfuscation.
 
krogen said:
But that is no longer OCR. OCR software is not pre-defined for certain font styles.

Surely one could develop a reader that will read some obfuscated text, but that's all it is, a reader of some certain known obfuscation.
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OCR is based on pattern recognition, you only have to manually add the new patterns, that is all, it will still be OCR.
 
krogen said:
But that is no longer OCR. OCR software is not pre-defined for certain font styles.
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Google's own OCR software, Tesseract, is certainly tunable to typefaces. Without tuning, it tends to produce poor results.
 
I guarantee (without proof, mind you--lol), that whatever people show and claim that "the NSA cannot decipher," it's probably years behind the technical computing capabilities what intelligence agencies can actually do. And if someone makes public a method--similar to this video--there's no way anyone should think it's usable anymore, once you've shown everyone what you're doing. It's like advertising this super high-level encoder that is so advanced that no one can crack it, yet you're giving away the decode key. Makes it worthless. Idiot.

I would also be shocked if consumer-level encryption is not easily cracked with the computing power that intelligence agencies probably have. And also, no doubt, what they say they have is probably what they had 10 years ago.

I say all this not as a tin-foil-hat wearer, but as someone with common sense.
 
krogen said:
Surely one could develop a reader that will read some obfuscated text, but that's all it is, a reader of some certain known obfuscation.
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I didn't read the article, but my assumption is that any given letter from one use to another could have differences encouraged by say, a RNG, such that in combination with surrounding numbers it leaves a high degree of accuracy for a human reader but makes it difficult to brute force via classical OCR. This is really just applying cipher mechanics to the realm of OCR, where the "machine" capable of decryption is the human mind, obviously not something easy to replicate without a neural network. I repeat that I didn't read the article because I don't have to...there has been research in this field for quite some time.
 
Merc1138 said:
"Hey, this OCR result for this text is garbage, let's simply flag this to be re-examined later"
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Reminds me of this:
security.png
 
Shame I can't read any of that crap either. I guess it works too good.
 
I guess nobody actually visited the website. It's the only site I've ever seen that scrolls sideways instead of vertically.
 
If a human can read it, so too can OCR. Perhaps not today, or not immediately, but certainly in the near future if a need arises.

Also let's be clear that this only affects things that you print out and mail it. If you send an email with this font, then every computer can already read it. It's not entirely clear to me that the creator understands this, as he recommends internet users use it. The only one seeing your "ZXX" type in that case is going to be you, nobody else will see it. Unless I guess you send everyone images containing your text instead, but then the people receiving it that you want to read it are just going to get annoyed with you, and probably not read it.
 
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