Slashdot Mirror
Interpol Unscrambles Doctored Photo In Manhunt
jackpot777 writes in with an AP story out of Paris reporting that Interpol has distributed photos of a man suspected of sexually exploiting children. The images were recovered from pictures taken off the Internet in which the man's face had been blurred using something like Photoshop's Filter > Distort > Twirl tool. German police were able to recover recognizable images of the man, whose identity and nationality are not known. Interpol would not discuss the techniques used to recover the images. jackpot777 writes: "It does show one interesting facet of internet privacy that has also been noted with topics ranging from reading blurred check numbers in images to Google's plan to blur out license plate and face data for Street View. And that is: blurring is not the same as completely obscuring. As computers become more adept at extrapolating data of different types, your identity isn't safe unless you completely cover all those identifying features."
Flattening usually refers to losing layer information in a multilayer image file (it becomes "flat" instead of a stack of image layers). It's possible the shapes you're drawing are on their own layer (or are a vector art layer), and so when you export to a graphics format that doesn't support layers (gif,jpg,png,tiff,et al) it warns you.
Likewise, if it doesn't warn you, I'd be worried the layer information was being preserved.