converting PDFs for Tesseract

Related

OCRmyPDF is an all-in-one tool that adds a text layer to the PDF. Uses Tessaract internally. When possible, inserts OCR information as a “lossless” operation without disrupting any other content. Thanks to Gaurav Ujjwal for the link. (I’m doing an OCR step as part of ingesting PDFs into a database, so I don’t need to see the text, but this could be good for PDFs that you actually want to read and not just do aggregated reporting on.)

Example of where GDPR compliance doesn’t get you CCPA compliance: This is the mistake that Honda recently made. CCPA/CPRA is not just a subset of GDPR. GDPR allows a company to verify an objection to processing, but CCPA does not allow a company to verify an opt out of sale. (IMHO the EU should harmonize by adopting the California good-faith, reasonable, and documented belief that a request to opt-out is fraudulent standard for objections to processing.)

New Report: Many Companies May Be Ignoring Opt-Out Requests Under State Privacy Laws - Innovation at Consumer Reports The study examined 40 online retailers and found that many of them appear to be ignoring opt-out requests under state privacy laws. (A lot more companies are required to comply with CCPA/CPRA than there are qualified compliance managers. Even if companies fix some of the obvious problems identified in this new CR report, there are still a bunch of data transfers that are obvious detectable violations if a GPC flag wasn’t correctly set for a user in the CRM system. You can’t just fix the cookie—GPC also has to cover downstream usage such as custom audiences and server-to-server APIs.)

Bonus links

EU may “make an example of X” by issuing $1 billion fine to Musk’s social network by Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica. (A lot of countries don’t need to raise their own tariffs in order to retaliate against the USA’s tariffs. They just need to stop letting US companies slide when they violate laws over there. If they can’t rely on the USA for regional security, there’s no reason not to. Related: US Cloud soon illegal? at noyb.eu)

Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead by Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler at 404 Media. Unless Trump folds, the tariffs will make the price of everything go up. Unemployment will go up. People will buy less stuff, and companies will spend less money on advertising that powers tech platforms. The tech industry, which has thrived on the cheap labor, cheap parts, cheap manufacturing, and supply chains enabled by free and cheap international trade, will now have artificial costs and bureaucracy tacked onto all of this. The market knows this, which is why tech stocks are eating shit. (Welcome to the weak men create hard times phase—but last time we had one of these, the dismal Microsoft monopoly days are when we got the web and Linux scenes that evolved into today’s Big Tech. Whatever emerges from the high-unemployment, import-denied generation, it’s going to surprise us.)

Alternative to Starlink: Eutelsat Provides Ukraine With Access to Satellite Internet by Taras Safronov. According to Berneke, Eutelsat has been providing high-speed satellite Internet services in Ukraine through a German distributor for about a year.

The coming pro-smoking discourse by Max Read. (Then: social media is the new smoking. Now: smoking is the new social media?)

Signal sees its downloads double after scandal by Sarah Perez on TechCrunch. Appfigures chalks up the doubling of downloads to the old adage all press is good press, as the scandal increased Signal’s visibility and likely introduced the app to thousands of users for the first time. (Signal is also, according to traders on Manifold Markets, the e2e messaging program least likely to provide message content to US law enforcement. Both Apple, the owner of iMessage, and Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, have other businesses that governments can lean on in order to get cooperation. Signal just has e2e software and reputation, so fewer points of leverage.)

Substack rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse also by Sarah Perez. Per-byline RSS feeds ftw. Check some reporter pages on there, such as Sarah Perez, Author at TechCrunch and Natasha Lomas, Author at TechCrunch with the RSSPreview extension installed. (I’m cautiously optimistic that ActivityPub might be able to address the comments and pingback problems for blogs and small sites in ways that SaaS comments didn’t and Twitter at its peak almost did.)

YouTube removes ‘gender identity’ from hate speech policy by Taylor Lorenz (In the medium term, a lot of the moderation changes at Big Tech are going to turn into a recruiting challenge for hiring managers in marketing departments. If an expected part of working in marketing is going to be mandatory involvement in sending money to weird, creepy right-wing dudes, that means you’re mostly going to get to hire…weird, creepy right-wing dudes.) Related: slop capitalism and dead internet theory by Adam Aleksic. Our best way of fighting back? Spend as little time on algorithmic media as possible, strengthen our social ties, and gather information from many different sources—remembering that the platforms are the real enemy.