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Comment by johnnyfived | Hacker News Reader

Why is this advertised for passwords only? It should work for any pixelated text. Just because cracking passwords sounds like a cool use case? This project is shooting itself in the foot. Plus it's not like passwords are ever pixelated on-screen, they're generally stylized as asterisks. But sweet leet hacking skills bro

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A similar method was used to uncover the name of a game mode in a teaser video from nintendo. Since it was a video the pixels would change as things moved and you could reverse the pixelation fairly well.

What about that bitcoin wallet that was blurred on TV and they managed to reverse engineer it?

Cannot find source.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41737248

> Two French hackers used their computer skills to reconstruct a blurred-out code on TV and claim bitcoins worth $1,000 (£760).

It was Bitcoin cash, so the 3 are worth, today, ~$1320.

I think the hackers could have made more money if they got real jobs doing valuable work.

The money they _directly_ got out of this might not have been their only motivation.

Funny they say bitcoins when 1 bitcoin was at least $1000 back then. I'm pretty sure the usual grammar rules apply so you can't use the plural unless you have at least 2 bitcoins. Super minor but interesting how a vastly deflated currency that is super divisible can mess with our usual language.

Any source for this? That sounds interesting.

It looks like this may be more due to a mistake in the censor area than a general pattern you can use but here it is https://twitter.com/Lattie9001/status/1027204063811850240

These kinds of mistakes show up constantly. Another one that often works is when people draw black bars over words they are often no 100% opaque and you can chuck them in to gimp, drag the levels around until the original word is exposed.

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