It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

Summary

Last month I asked people to hack part of my YouTube video, specifically to de-pixelate the contents of a folder I had pixelated starting at the 4:57 mark. Your browser does not support the video tag. For years, people have used the censor tool to blur or pixelate out parts of videos where there's sensitive information. And for years, every time I've used it, I get a few comments from people saying that's not a safe way to censor information. So is that true? I wanted to find out, so I put a message saying I'd send fifty bucks to anyone who could tell me what it said under the pixelation. And you know what? Less than a day later, three people solved it, using three slightly different techniques—scary! This blog post is a lightly edited transcript of the following video: How did they do it? But how did they do it? I asked each of them, and they were more than happy to share. For most of us who like reverse-engineering or tinkering, it's fun to share the craft. And even more fun when it's sanctioned fun. Add on a little monetary reward, and that's just icing on the cake. GitHub user KoKuToru was kind enough to share an entire GitHub repo with the process and the code, along with two different ways that user tried to depixlate my footage. First a brute-force attempt to extract aligned images of just the window, with some code using TensorFlow to extract pixel data and aggregate it into a somewhat-fuzzy (but almost clear enough to read) picture: Your browser does not support the video tag. The idea here is the pixelation is kind of like shutters over a picture. As you move the image beneath, you can peek into different parts of the picture. As long as you have a solid frame of reference, like the window that stays the same size, you can 'accumulate' pixel data from the picture underneath. Due to the slight error in selecting the window by hand, the final result was slightly blotchy. For the second attempt, GIMP was used to get a better window selection algorithm with ff...