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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

This is someone being funny right?

Because they can just load the font file into their ocr software and it will recognize it just fine?

From the article:

    They're not meant to be long-term tools with which to combat the NSA. 
    Rather, he views them as an awareness-raising measure.

Perhaps it would be better if these fonts were created on a daily basis, or if people created their own independently. It could significantly add to the processing load of the OCR process.

Daily isn't often enough to defeat statistical analysis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#Rej...

Or we could just all start handwriting again, lol

Actually, software that identifies handwriting is far more advanced than OCR, mainly because its been a problem for far longer. How do you think the postal office handles all those handwritten letters and postcards?

While that's true, it has also been a very focused problem - e.g. Reading digits + capital letters, with known constraints (in the US the capital letters are pairs from a set of 50 states; in the UK, the form is DLD DLD (D=Digit, L=Letter) and the list of legal combinations is far smaller then all.

General handwriting recognition, especially cursive writing, is still a very hard problem.

No need to find whatever font was used; statistical analysis of the message already does the trick.

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