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Comment by falsenapkin | Hacker News Reader

I want random-text-overlay-pixelation (or some lookalike) as a feature instead of plain-text-pixelation. Giant black boxes everywhere is quite the distraction, whereas blur/pixelation is not, so just make the underlying data random.

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I would think the real pro move is to make the underlying data be lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up" or somesuch.

My employer makes a tool that does this! It's a screenshot tool we had been using internally for years that we released last year. It takes a sample of the colors in the image and uses them for random-looking obfuscation. So it's obvious that the data is hidden, but there's no pattern or way to un-blur that data. It doesn't work as well on low-contrast images, but we find it quite useful for hiding sensitive data. Some examples:

frog: https://cdn.zappy.app/f97505ba92625a0e949aebcfa4220852.png

wikipedia: https://cdn.zappy.app/3b7d5cf750066633e40aeddda926f95f.png

It's not really targeted at the HN crowd (requires an account, etc), but the app is "Zappy" if folks are interested.

- https://zapier.com/zappy

So, the distribution of the original pixels determines the distribution of the blurred pixels? That's an interesting challenge!

I think it's kinda hard to see on the wikipedia example what has been redacted. I just do "Obfuscate" in Greenshot with pixel size 16. Call me when this algorithm reverses this https://i.imgur.com/NYf0Dpe.png! :D

> Giant black boxes everywhere is quite the distraction

Opaque gray boxes then?

Honestly the right answer. Another commenter alluded to "right" blur and "wrong" blur not being culturally practical.

I do this on my website with paywalled information. It respects upper/lowercasing and spacing but randomises each character. Anyone can disable the CSS blur but the data is still obfuscated.

https://imgur.com/a/NY6xKie

This reminds me of Manning liveBook's obfuscation strategy [0]. It scrambles the letters to keep the majority of the specific details obfuscated while somewhat revealing the gist (word length, acronyms, anagrams, code segments) presumably to encourage sales and discourage piracy.

[0] Ex. https://livebook.manning.com/book/programming-the-ti-83-plus...

Potentially leaking names by giving out number of letters in name and surname? Just wondering. If so, consider killing or randomizing spaces and letter count.

That sounds extremely confusing

Ideally the user wouldn't have to do anything. Whatever your editing tool is would have some "text blur" mode which functions and looks like normal blur but the end result is blurred garbage.

I think as far as culture goes it would be simpler to promote the idea that black bars are the only way to do it, than that you need to make sure you're using a special software that knows how to securely pixelate text.

It is a cool idea though, and text-shaped pixelation is much more satisfying than random noise. (And if someone's cheeky enough to decode it, they will be very disappointed ;)

You're definitely right.. but I still want my overcomplicated blur ;)

Oh I thought you meant it would replace black bars with random not blurred text lol

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