human eyes only
Security and privacy
document obfuscation
SHOW HN2022
How HN took it
4 positive, 15 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 52 critical, out of 75 comments about the project. Thread score -0.52.
Privacy: 0 for, 18 againstIdea: 3 for, 12 againstExecution: 0 for, 10 againstDesign: 1 for, 4 againstDocs: 0 for, 5 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Clever, elegant approach to thwarting non-targeted scrapers
From 2 comments
I think people will get tripped up by you saying it "can't" be OCR'd or that it is difficult to do so, and will end up looking past a pretty elegant solution in the process. This…
jffry on HNIt takes the embedded font out of your PDF, and then maps non-latin characters (japanese, cyrillic, etc) to render as if they looked like a latin character. So in the example on…
viggity on HN
Polished site and implementation
From 2 comments
I like your intent (helping your friend), and I'm _REALLY_ impressed at the polish (clever name, nice looking website, convert-for-free microservice) but I'm sad to report (like…
loxias on HNImpressive, the example web text area is very lovely too
hexo on HN
Objections
Built-in or standard OCR (rasterize then OCR) defeats it easily
From 4 comments
This is broken in multiple ways, some obvious, some not. 1. Obviously most people jumped directly to OCR, and that works of course. So counter to the OP, you can trivially render…
bscphil on HN> As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't see any images and can't convert it. That isn't true. Acrobat might skip parts of the PDF that it thinks are already…
solardev on HNUsing CLI OCR, I am getting a 100% match: `Name: Satoshi Nakamoto DOB: 1982-06-05 SSN: 958-20-3141 Cell Phone: 514-867-5309`
hartator on HNMacOS does OCR on this just fine. Screenshot, open in Preview, and select, copy, paste: Name: Satoshi Nakamoto DOB: 1982-06-05 SSN: 958-20-3141 Cell Phone: 514-867-5309
s1mon on HN
Harms accessibility for screen readers and copy-paste
From 3 comments
This is terrible for accessibility, please don't do this.
dawnerd on HNThe reason - to make it only readable by human eyes - doesn’t make sense. It is always only ever readable by human eyes since bots don’t have eyes. You don’t mean eyes, but…
justshowpost on HNI am a blind user using an extension to my screen reader which (under the covers) uses the Windows 10 built-in OCR. Your sample document gives me: INTRODUCTION The Cybersecurity…
ctoth on HN
Name and framing are misleading about OCR
From 2 comments
I understand that. And I understand your personal use case was valid. But I think your "Human Eyes Only" name and domain is a little deceptive.
bil7 on HNOf course. The OP doesn't understand what "OCR" actually means.
bambax on HN
Substitution cipher is trivially broken by frequency analysis
From 1 comment
This is broken in multiple ways, some obvious, some not. 1. Obviously most people jumped directly to OCR, and that works of course. So counter to the OP, you can trivially render…
bscphil on HN
Requests
Suggestions for stronger OCR-resistant transforms
From 1 comment
I like your intent (helping your friend), and I'm _REALLY_ impressed at the polish (clever name, nice looking website, convert-for-free microservice) but I'm sad to report (like…
loxias on HN
Questions
How does the mapping work
From 1 comment
Fascinating. How does this work?
maybeiambatman on HN
Alternatives named
Password-protected PDFs and watermarks
From 2 comments
Password-protect (i.e. encrypt) the documents and provide the passwords on a separate piece of paper with your reasoning and concerns clearly laid out. This won't prevent the…
hda2 on HN> afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet Any chance of getting a clear protective order in advance from the judge, and then enforcing that…
schoen on HN
ZXX typeface
From 1 comment
You could use the ZXX typeface to defy OCR: https://walkerart.org/magazine/sang-mun-defiant-typeface-nsa-privacy It’s probably still not ML-resistant.
layer8 on HN
Protective court orders
From 1 comment
> afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet Any chance of getting a clear protective order in advance from the judge, and then enforcing that…
schoen on HN