...@IainB - really fine OCR-job! How much did you after-edit manually? If only a little or nothing, I would really want to know the name of your OCR program!
Download by October 1, 2012 and enjoy it FREE of charge forever-Norton Identity Safe
-it could just mean "lifetime key" => "for the rest of version 2012's life".
-Curt
The OCR was done by MS OneNote. It seems to be a particularly good OCR tool - usually does a very good job of OCR, and with few errors - but that would always depend on the quality of the image being scanned.
How I did the text extraction:
The text of the agreement came up in a small scrollable, non-stretchable window at install time (you had to accept it before it would proceed with the installation). The text in the window was non-selectable (maybe an image?), so I paused at that point and hunted around for a separate text file of the agreement on Norton's NIS webpages. When I couldn't find one, I skeptically supposed that Norton would have deliberately made it difficult for the user to retrieve the agreement, for a reason, and that I might not see this agreement again unless I reinstalled NIS. Most of it was the usual legal "all care and no responsibility" sort of stuff, so I decided to only capture what seemed to be the most convoluted and interesting part - section 10.
So I took a screen capture of each sequential piece of text in the window, using the OneNote screen clipping tool - it came to 6 and a bit clips, all told. I arranged them all in the LH column of a two-column table in OneNote, then right clicked each image, selected Copy Text from Picture (which puts the OCR'd text to Clipboard), and pasted the text into the corresponding slot in the RH column of the table.
When I reviewed the OCR'd text I was surprised at the high quality, but figured that that would be attributable to the clarity of the clip. I started corrections (e.g., some lower case characters had scanned as upper case, a "/" had scanned as a "|") and then stopped as I realised that I had made 6 or so and they all seemed to be minor, so I was probably being too fussy - the thing read OK without needing any more corrections.
I didn't need to extract the text for my own purposes - it was just that I thought the
text would be of more use to the DC forum readers than an image, and it would be copyable and
searchable.
(The reason I didn't need to extract the text in OneNote in the first place was because I have set OneNote to automatically
search inside all images for any relevant embedded text when you search for something. I think it is indexed. You can always extract the text - as above - as and when you might need to copy it. From experience, that searching of embedded text in images works with high accuracy.)
Back to that agreement
section 10: it generally
seems to be suggesting that you accept that you may have absolutely no privacy of your information and that Norton could do what the heck they wanted with your:
- IP address.
- MAC addess.
- Machine ID.
- IMEI.
- Data.
As for the meaning of "lifetime", I suspect it may have been deliberately left ambiguous and open to interpretation. I certainly could never recommend that a client enter into such an agreement, and I wouldn't do it myself either. I'm not even sure the agreement would necessarily be legal in all countries. It will be interesting to see how many people actually fall for what looks like Norton's super-free offer to
taking your privacy away for your lifetime use of the product. Who knows but that they may even intend to sell the data to certain government agencies?
I think the military-grade encryption-at-source approach - e.g., including (say) disk encryption, Wuala, X-Marks, or LastPass - would arguably be the most advisable and secure route to take for the medium/long term.
"NIS is your friend."
Yeah, right.
