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Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

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Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#71

Post by jolmg »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #59
a9t9 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that hosted OCR, just like SaaS in general, is not suitable for every use case. On the other hand, the OCR.space OCR API has a very strict privacy policy: https://ocr.space/privacypolicy - All uploaded images and the extracted text are deleted immediatly after processing.

Why did you end up going with a .space domain? We blocked that whole TLD because we were getting massive amounts of spam from it when it first came out.

Oh dear. My main domain and email are in the .space TLD. I hope your practice is not widespread.

Personally, I chose .space simply because it's cool, cheap, and not overcrowded. It also seems to lend itself well to being part of a name.

I know spam is a hard problem, but I wish you wouldn't label me a spammer simply because of the TLD I chose.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#72

Post by angry_octet »

cortesoft wrote: post #58
angry_octet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the page. Yes, it isn't obvious is it? Look down the bottom. https://ocr.space/ It uploads everything to a commercial OCR service. Which provides these CPU cycles 'for free'. Who owns this data? Do you have a privacy agreement with ocr.space? Can you trust them as far as you could spit? It doesn't matter that this is documented though. Unless it had a popup banner EVERY TIME YOU USED IT saying "Your data will be…

I think you are going a bit too far with your requirement for a popup banner every time you use it. Do you expect a popup banner every time you click a link on a web page taking you to a third party website, because they are going to be able to run javascript code on your computer? As long as the plugin is clear that they are using a third party service that will recieve your images, I think it is fine to leave it at…

In reply to you first question, no, because it is my computer, it runs with same origin policy in the sandbox. And I've chosen to enable js for that site. So it couldn't do what this extension does, which is cross site data transfer.

If the end user clicks the 'do not show again' checkbox on the message, sure. But it should still be graphically represented whenever you use an insecure cloud plugin, e.g. via an unlocked padlock sub icon if it doesn't use TLS, maybe a cloud sub-icon to represent someone else's computer.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#73

Post by treitnauer »

jolmg wrote: post #71
JoblessWonder wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you end up going with a .space domain? We blocked that whole TLD because we were getting massive amounts of spam from it when it first came out.

Oh dear. My main domain and email are in the .space TLD. I hope your practice is not widespread. Personally, I chose .space simply because it's cool, cheap, and not overcrowded. It also seems to lend itself well to being part of a name. I know spam is a hard problem, but I wish you wouldn't label me a spammer simply because of the TLD I chose.

That's one of the problems with cheap domains in the sub $5 range. Some gTLD registries (.space included) thought it was a good idea to offer them really cheap, but what they got were mostly spammers which puts you in a bad neighborhood.

There are a few others which you may want to avoid according to this report: https://securityintelligence.com/enticing-clicks-with-spam/

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#74

Post by awqrre »

johnvonneumann wrote: post #69
qz_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah apparently it uses https://ocr.space/ , deal-breaker for me.

Can you explain why this is a deal breaker? Is it the use of OCR or the choice of provider? Assume I know nothing here, because I do.

it adds a third party in the equation...

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#75

Post by awqrre »

ghostly_s wrote: post #46
kebman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deal breaker because THAT'S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS, and that also goes for Copyfish. It smells fishy to me, and _promises_ never kept prying eyes away secret documents. People who handle confidential documents should never use SaaS. It's an issue of trust, and Copyfish deserves none.

Okay, don't use it then. They make no claims of enhanced privacy and frankly it's unreasonable to presume a service such as this would do all processing locally unless you're paying a premium for that ability. Or did I miss the "Great for confidential documents!" banner? For most peoples' use-cases, this is not a concern.

Mozilla should have made an effort to have that OCR code be able to be ran locally... not everything needs the cloud (well, almost nothing)

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#76

Post by ocrcustomserver »

xophishox wrote: post #20

Give me an api end point to send an image to, and a text response. Ill hand you cash.

Like a9t9 said, ABBYY, Microsoft and Google offer this.

If your images however differ from the typical text document, recognition from those services will fail. OCR is highly dependent on the particular application and the kind of images that you're dealing with. Preprocessing and segmentation are very important.

If you need a custom solution, my email is in my profile.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#77

Post by ocrcustomserver »

kebman wrote: post #39
superasn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a deal breaker?

It's a deal breaker because THAT'S NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS, and that also goes for Copyfish. It smells fishy to me, and _promises_ never kept prying eyes away secret documents. People who handle confidential documents should never use SaaS. It's an issue of trust, and Copyfish deserves none.

If you need a private OCR server that you can host yourself (locally or on the cloud), shoot me an email.

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#78

Post by ocrcustomserver »

a9t9 wrote: post #56
mnem wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper for a service to OCR locally than remotely.

There is simply no good OCR engine available that can run inside a Chrome or Firefox extension. The best available is Tesseract.js. And while this engine is fantastic as a project, its recognition rate does not come close to what is available server side.

I agree. There's also ocrad.js .

Re: Show HN: Copyfish – Extract text from images, videos or PDF

#80

Post by PokemonNoGo »

tangue wrote: post #18
tobltobs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what lib is using ocr.space for OCR?

I suspect they're using Tesseract as they've written a gui for it ( https://ocr.space/blog/p/free-ocr-windows.html ) but there's no way to find more.

I guess it auto defaults to English then? Running Tesseract on Scandinavian texts gives AAO instead of ÅÄÖ in my experience if you don't supply the correct language training set. That's quite the hen and the egg problem. Can't language identify without the text can't get the text without the right language identified.
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