Updates on OCR and the OCR API...
The German Public TV station “Norddeutscher Rundfunk” reports that they were offered data that includes the surfing habits of three million German citizens. It seems this data was, at least partly, collected by the “Web of trust” (WOT) browser extensions. This is as bad as it sounds. The TV station was able to use this data to identify the browsing habits of individual persons – including high-ranking German and EU politicians.
The November Free OCR API update adds two often requested features:
Easier authentication via request header
Base 64 support for sending images
The API url and format has not changed. Also, we still support the old authentication methods. So, unless you decide to make use of the new features, this upgrade will be 100% transparent to you.
In more details:
Welcome to the official home page for the (a9t9) Free OCR for Windows Desktop tool. As the name suggests, it extracts text from image files and PDF items. It uses the open-source Tesseract OCR engine from HP/Google for OCR processing.
Welcome to the official home page for the (a9t9) Chinese Subtitles Translator.
Chinese Subtitle Translator (or simply CST) recognizes the Chinese characters of the subtitle directly in the video and translates them to Pinyin and English. All this works visually, directly on any video portal like Youtube.
Learning Chinese has one great advantage: Most Chinese movies and TV shows are subtitled in Chinese by default. But as we Chinese learners are all painfully aware of, there is no easy link between a character and its pronunciation and tone. For that we have Pinyin, the phonetic language for Chinese. But finding movies with Pinyin subtitles is almost impossible outside special clips for Chinese learners. And there was never an easy way to look up a new vocabulary word while watching a video… … that is until now.
After opening a self-driving car highway test track last year, German federal transport minister Dobrindt announced today that he created a so called ethics commission to advise on a legal framework for self driving cars. The Commission is to be headed by former Federal Constitutional Court judge Udo di Fabio and will start work later this month, according to the German weekly “Wirtschaftswoche”.
The goal is a legal framework how cars which are controlled by computer must behave in dangerous situations. Programmers can then use this framework as orientation.
According to the interview, a few key decisions are already made:
