It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

My Windows-98 approved method for redacting a screenshot:

1) Open screenshot in MS-Paint (can you even install MS-Paint anymore? Or is it Paint3D now?)

2) Select Color 1: Black

3) Select Color 2: Black

4) Use rectangular selection tool to select piece of text I want to censor.

5) Click the DEL key. The rectangle should now be solid black.

6) Save the screenshot.

As far as I know, AI hasn't figured out a way to de-censor solid black yet.

https://jspaint.app/ (https://github.com/1j01/jspaint)

That's going to be a lot of work for a YouTube video though

It’s possible, depending upon the circumstances. If you are censoring a particular extract of text and it uses a proportional font, then only certain combinations of characters will fit in a given space. Most of those combinations will be gibberish, leaving few combinations – perhaps only one – that has both matching metrics and meaning.

There was a programming competition, can't remember which, similar to IOCCC but more about problematic software? where the redaction was reversible despite being pure black, due to the format chosen allowing for left over information in the image (vastly reduced quality but it was enough to allow text to be recovered!) [edit: see replies!]

There was also the Android (and iOS?) truncation issue where parts of the original image were preserved if the edited image took up less space. [edit: also see replies!]

Knowing some formats have such flaws (and I'm too lazy to learn which), I think the best option I think is to replace step 6 with "screenshot the redacted image", so in effect its a completely new image based on what the redacted image looks like, not on any potential intricacies of the format et al.

this method looks worse than pixelation/blurry style, those "just" need to be updated to destroy info first instead of faithfully using the original text

What I love about this method is that it so closely matches what actual US govt censors do with documents pending release: take a copy, black it out with solid black ink, then _take a photocopy of that_ and use the photocopy for distribution.

This is odd because when I follow your steps up to Step 5, the rectangle that gets cut out from the screenshot is white. I did remember to follow steps 2 and 3.

Might've changed in recent versions of Paint if you're on Win 11. It definitely used to take whatever you had as Color 2 as your background.

If you want the blurred/pixelated look, blur/pixelate something else (like a lorem ipsum) and copy it over to the actual screenshot.

7) Print the screenshot

8) Scan the printed screenshot

> can you even install MS-Paint anymore? Or is it Paint3D now?

Paint3D, the successor to MSPaint, is now discontinued in favor of MSPaint, which doesn't support 3d but it now has Microsoft account sign-in and AI image generation that runs locally on your Snapdragon laptop's NPU but still requires you to be signed in and connected to the internet to generate images. Hope that clears things up

Don’t do this on a PDF document though. ;)

Not forgetting subpixel rendering.

There's tricks like this with embedded thumbnails.

Or take a blurry misaligned photo of the screen.

Still does.

This is similar to how I censor images on a cellphone. I use an editor to cover what I want to censor with a black spot, then take a screenshot of that edited image and delete the original.

This. Never give the original file, always take a screenshot of it. If it’s text being blacked out, it can be guessed from the length of words.

You are thinking of John Meacham’s winning entry in the 2008 underhanded C contest https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html

Maybe you're referring to "aCropalypse". Also there was an issue once where sections with overpainted solid black color still retained the information in the alpha channel.

https://www.wired.com/story/acropalyse-google-markup-windows...

https://www.lifewire.com/acropalypse-vulnerability-shows-why...

The underhanded C contest: https://www.underhanded-c.org/

>2) Select Color 1: Black

You don't need this step. It already defaults to black, and besides when you do "delete" it doesn't use color 1 at all, only color 2.

Solid color would convey far less information, but it would still convey a minimum length of the secret text. If you can assume the font rendering parameters, this helps a ton.

As a simple scenario with monospace font rendering, say you know someone is censoring a Windows password that is (at most) 16 characters long. This significantly narrows the search space!

Should be ok if you rasterize the PDF. Run something like pdftotext after to be sure it doesn't have any text.

Or to be safe, print it and scan it, or just take a screenshot.

Testing that it doesn’t have text doesn’t help if the text was a bitmap in the first place.

Normally the use case is that you still want to distribute it as a PDF, usually consisting of many pages, and without loss of quality, so the printing/scanning/screenshotting option may not be very practical.

No, the real solution is to use an editor that allows you to remove text (and/or cut out bitmaps), before you add black rectangles for clarity.

That sort of makes me wonder if the best form of censoring would be solid black shape, THEN passing it through some diffusion image generation step to infill the black square. It will be obvious that it's fake, but it'll make determining the "edges" of the censored area a lot harder. (Might also be a bit less distracting than a big black shape, for your actual non-advisarial viewers!)

If you REALLY care then replace the real information with fake information and pixelate that.

But most people don’t care enough.

Or I guess you could make a little video of pixelation that you just paste on top so it looks like you pixelated the thing but in reality there’s no correspondence between the original image and what’s on screen.

Wow glad to see there were other fans of MSPaint, can't believe I built my open source version with wxWidgets 16 years ago https://github.com/murdockq/OpenPaint

> AI hasn't figured out a way to de-censor solid black yet.

I did though, under certain circumstances. Microsoft's Snipping Tool was vulnerable to the "acropalypse" vulnerability - which mostly affected the cropping functionality, but could plausibly affect images with blacked-out regions too, if the redacted region was a large enough fraction of the overall image.

The issue was that if your edited image had a smaller file size than the original, only the first portion of the file was overwritten, leaving "stale" data in the remainder, which could be used to reconstruct a portion of the unedited image.

To mitigate this in a more paranoid way (aside from just using software that isn't broken) you could re-screenshot your edited version.

I also recall at one point some image file format that ended up leaking sensitive info, because it had a embedded preview or compressed image, and the editing program failed to regenerate the preview after a censor attempt.

Was a loooong time ago, so I don’t remember the details.

AT&T leaked information, as did the US Attorney's Office, when they released PDFs with redacted information. To redact, they changed the background of the text to match the color of the text. You could still copy and paste the text block to reveal the original contents.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/at-38t-leaks-sensiti...

Forgot the wooden table step...

Make sure your editor uses real pure black to cover the region. Chances are, if you use a general image editing app and if you deal with concepts like "brushes" you are not using pure black; it's mostly likely black with varying alpha channel.

I think it depends on the new layers feature that’s on my version of Paint. If I make the base layer be transparent, then the cutout is transparent.

Maybe silly, but I'd always take a screenshot of the final thing and then paste that to a new file... just to be sure.

Wow, it took me a minute to figure out how his entry works. You really could read that code and assume it was correct. The resulting image is perfectly redacted visually, and the missing data is not appended or hidden elsewhere in the file. You would only discover it by inspecting the PPM image in a text editor. Very sneaky!

I would guess that would be due to compression algorithms.

Luckily the current Microsoft screen snip utility is so buggy I often have to screen shot my edited screen shots anyway to get it to my clipboard.

Step 5.5) Take a new screenshot of the image.

Back in the TechTV days one of the hosts used Photoshop to crop a photo of herself before posting it online. One would think a crop, completely removing the part of the image would be even better than solid black. However, with the way Photoshop worked in 2003, it didn't crop the embedded Exif thumbnail, which people were able to use to get the uncropped image.

Too bad that they only show the winners up to 2015. All the later ones are on github.com, but are harder to find.

News publications are also encouraged to do the same or even re-type the raw document. There was a story about how they shared raw scans of the leaked documents such that the yellow printer id dots were visible. That might have been for C. Manning?

Maxis was simply ahead of its time.

what about intentional adding data into image?

screenshot - im not convinced apple does not use invisible watermark to add info into image data. but for fact every photo you take with iphone, contains invisible watermark with your "phone serial number". to remove such watermarks, facebook is converting every picture you post for last 10 years... just weird extra con to using modern technology.

try to copy banknote on your printer, it will not print anything, just says error. + every page of text printed contains barely visible yellow marks containing again serial number of printer.

....

step 5.5.5 - tell chatgpt what is on image to regenerate it for you XD

Yes, very important! I personally use a black box sticker.

Most people have no clue, they are fooled by tools that lie to them, if they didn't care enough they wouldn't use the tools to hide the info

…somehow, it uses 99.9% opacity for the fill…

I wish I could tell if this is satire or not.

I think the edges would still be evident, and this would just waste time and energy. I think a black square is just fine, so long as you can leak some information on the length of the secret. I would make it larger than it needs to be.