Jeff Geerling demonstrated that it’s easier than ever to de-censor videos by pixelating a folder window in one of his videos and offering $50 to anyone who could read what was behind it. In his write-up he reports that three viewers solved the challenge within a day, using slightly different techniques. One practical implementation is KoKuToru’s de-pixelate project: as the window moves, the mosaic cells shift over the static content behind it, so pixels accumulated from around 200 frames add up to a readable image. The tooling is ffmpeg, GIMP and about four hours of proof-of-concept code. This raises concerns about privacy for content that relies on blurring or pixelation for anonymization, especially when it moves. Geerling’s own takeaway is to place a pure-color mask over sensitive areas instead, since pixelation turns out to be more of a suggestion than a redaction.
