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Did Comodo admit to using OCR for this, and that it wasn't a human transcription mistake (humans mistake 1's and l's too) It just seems odd for them to use an

Did Comodo admit to using OCR for this, and that it wasn't a human transcription mistake (humans mistake 1's and l's too) It just seems odd for them to use an image of a web page to transcribe information from a web lookup when they could just scrape the text off the web page directly without using the intermediate image and OCR. However, I could see them using a human in the chain to look up the whois information, it just seems strange to come up with a complicated OCR solution (and if they did, that they couldn't find a font that makes 1's and l's look more distinct, like http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=4004 http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=4004)

wongarsu 10y ago
>when they could just scrape the text off the web page directly without using the intermediate image and OCR Try looking up whois info on google.eu. Most tools will simply output `NOT DISCLOSED! Visit www.eurid.eu for webbased whois.`. Now you can search https://whois.eurid.eu https://whois.eurid.eu for the whois information of google.eu. You will find that the email address is only available as an image. That's exactly the situation Comodo tried to solve. Given that it's a simple font with no obfuscation, a small pattern-matching python programm should give you near 100% accuracy. Apparently Comodo used some off-the-shelf software instead, and that software seems to make assumptions it shouldn't make.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Ahh interesting, so it's a case of the cure being worse than the disease -- spammers know how to use OCR too and they don't care about transcription errors. So it seems like there's little point in deliberately obscuring the email address in an image, and certainly no reason to do it with a font that doesn't more clearly distinguish between letters and numbers.
- technion 10y ago
  .com.au domains have the same issue. Every contact is: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs I wonder if Comodo had a similar issue there.

wongarsu 10y ago

>when they could just scrape the text off the web page directly without using the intermediate image and OCR Try looking up whois info on google.eu. Most tools will simply output `NOT DISCLOSED! Visit www.eurid.eu for webbased whois.`. Now you can search https://whois.eurid.eu https://whois.eurid.eu for the whois information of google.eu. You will find that the email address is only available as an image. That's exactly the situation Comodo tried to solve. Given that it's a simple font with no obfuscation, a small pattern-matching python programm should give you near 100% accuracy. Apparently Comodo used some off-the-shelf software instead, and that software seems to make assumptions it shouldn't make.

Johnny555 10y ago
Ahh interesting, so it's a case of the cure being worse than the disease -- spammers know how to use OCR too and they don't care about transcription errors. So it seems like there's little point in deliberately obscuring the email address in an image, and certainly no reason to do it with a font that doesn't more clearly distinguish between letters and numbers.
technion 10y ago
.com.au domains have the same issue. Every contact is: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs I wonder if Comodo had a similar issue there.