Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."

chromoZ writes with word that because of the serial blasts in Indian cities (and terrorist outfits claiming responsibility via email, often sent via Cyber Cafes and open Wi-Fi spots), sharing unsecured wireless access may get much tougher in India: "The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) after studying open Wifi networks is coming up with a set of guidelines and recommendations to secure them. 'All ISPs may be instructed to ensure that their subscribers using wireless devices must use effective authentication mechanisms and permit access to internet to only authorised persons using wireless devices.' An open Wi-Fi could be as much as illegal in India after this."