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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

When everyone's wearing this I'm gonna dress up as Ronald McDonald and walk invisibly through the crowds.

On a related note: I've been thinking about making a t-shirt with the EURion constellation[0] on it, just to see if I can break some CCTV camera software (which could be using software image parsing libraries which check for it) or mess with people's digital photos ("This software does not allow the unauthorised copying of bank notes")...

Could be fun, but might do nothing at all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Sounds lovely. How many angles would be needed for total vision blockage?

That's a really cool idea, but I don't think it would work.

From wikipedia: "Research shows that the EURion constellation is used for color photocopiers and is likely not used for computer software."

You can see this with photoshop, where the presence of the constellation does not appear to affect currency detection.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/projects/currency/

I don't have a screenshot handy, but I definitely got this error last year when I tried to open a picture of some bank notes in Photoshop. GIMP had no such qualms :-)

Seconded. I played around with it for a while as well - creating images in a different image editing app and then opening them in photoshop to see when the warning is triggered.

I knew there was some sort of preventative measures built into modern colour photocopiers but hadn't heard of the Eurion constellation until now. It turns out that it was actually discovered by the author of the excellent UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux [1] resource.

[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Man_%28Ghost_in_the_Sh... d:D

There is a part of the most recent episode of Black Mirror which deals with this (sort of, at least), totally worth checking out if this is an idea that interests you.

EDIT: In a comment below, the team mentioned this was their inspiration. Life imitate art imitates life. Cool!

John Wright's "The Golden Age" uses exactly that plot point early on: someone vanishing by wrapping themselves in a passing advertisement.

Also used in a William Gibson novel where a certain t-shirt is worn to hide the wearer from CCTV.

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