Blurring Images Not So Secure

An anonymous reader writes "Dheera Venkatraman explains in a webpage how an attacker might be able to extract personal information such as check or credit card numbers, from images blurred with a mosaic effect, potentially exposing the data behind hundreds of images of blurred checks found online, and provides a ficticious example. While much needs to be developed to apply such an algorithm to real photographic images, he offers a simple, yet obvious solution: cover up the sensitive information, don't blur it."

Comments

Text Black-Out

[sciop101]

Lazy Programmers black out text by just makint the background color equal to the text color. Hi-lighting the blacked out text makes the text reappear.

Holliwood was right after all

[PietjeJantje]

Endless magnification, not such a stupid concept after all.

Next, computers will have huge letters, beep whenever you press a key, an Override function for those pesty Permission Denied errors, and in general be Apples.