Honestly, I was wondering who uses pixelization. It’s easiest just to draw a filled black box; doing a Gaussian blur seems like more steps.
Þe biggest trouble I’ve had is redacting PDFs. I’ve found no reliable, easy way to do this on Linux.
Comment on Why You Should Never Use Pixelation To Hide Sensitive Text
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Yes, except now you can just use an AI to unpixelate something without doing all that work. It’s even more effective on video than with a still picture.
When redacting something make sure you’re not accidentally making it semi transparent. Use a box fill or hard edge brush with the opacity set to 100%. I’ve seen a lot of pictures posted where someone scribbles over the info with a soft edge brush and you can still see through it if you adjust the contrast.
Sxan@piefed.zip 1 day ago
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
You can use LibreOffice Draw to edit a PDF. It can actually delete text and images from the PDF. You do need to install all of the fonts that the PDF uses before editing it or they will be replaced with what you do have. That will probably mess up the layout if the replacement fonts are not compatible with the originals.
2910000@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I wonder if hypothetically, AI could do the same with a box over text, even if it was 100% opaque. For example, if the data from the layer containing text was part of the image data passed to an image compression algorithm, and that data was somehow reflected in the output
jacksilver@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If the image/video just has black pixels on the content, then there would be no information to extract and any attempt would just be filling things in.
When you talk about layers, you’re assuming that the creator left information behind in the Metadata, which wouldn’t require AI to extract.
2910000@lemmy.world 1 day ago
By layers I mean image layers when manipulating an image in an image editor. So I guess what you’re saying is an image would be flattened before being passed to a compression algorithm?
jacksilver@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Yeah, if I’m making something “masked/obscured” I should export it so that it’s in a raw format. That way there is no Metadata or information that could be leaked by accident.
Think of the Trump Epstein files, in those they kept them as pdfs so you could just unhighlight the redacted sections. If they had export it as a jpeg/png you wouldn’t be able to extract any information.
There are ways to remove the content from a pdf, but as we’ve seen, that leaves rooms for errors.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
If the image is moving it gets really trivial to uncensor.
Here’s a quick three-minute video about it from Level 2 Jeff.