YouTuber’s Pixelation Challenge Backfires – Is Video Censorship Broken?

When YouTuber Jeff Geerling tried to obscure part of his screen with chunky pixels, his viewers turned it into a game – and won in record time. Geerling, a popular tech vlogger and software developer, pixelated a section of his video (showing a list of private folders on his Mac) and even dangled a $50 reward for anyone who could decipher it​.

It seemed like an impossible task; the mosaic blur was so coarse that nothing discernible could be seen. However, observant viewers noticed that as Geerling moved the Finder window around, the mosaic pattern shifted slightly. Every time the window moved, the jumbled pixels changed just a bit. Those tiny changes were the break the community needed.

Within a day, at least two viewers cracked the code. Geerling soon pinned a comment acknowledging that multiple people managed to depixelate his folder listing and win the challenge. So how did they do it?

One participant, a developer known by the alias “KoKuToru,” detailed his process on GitHub. He pulled dozens of video frames and used free tools (the FFmpeg video toolkit and GIMP image editor) to extract any visible bits of the hidden text from each frame. By combining these fragments, he reconstructed a blurry-but-legible image of the folder names.

So it turns out that moving pixelated images contain enough information to restore what’s hidden behind the mask. What’s most striking is that none of this required any expensive or proprietary software.

This isn’t an isolated case, either. For example, the open-source utility Depix can take a pixelated password or text and match it against fonts to guess the original text. Its algorithm exploits the fact that pixelation (mosaic) filters use a deterministic process – the same input will produce the same big pixels – allowing savvy attackers to brute-force what the underlying text could be​.

And when brute force doesn’t apply, AI can step in: machine-learning models have been trained to un-blur faces or restore censored images by “hallucinating” details that look plausible. In other words, if there’s data left in the video – however muddled – there’s a good chance modern tech can find a way to reveal it.

This incident sends a clear warning to YouTubers, filmmakers, and social media creators: beware of relying on pixelation to hide sensitive information.

What started as a light-hearted challenge for Geerling could have just as easily been an accidental leak of confidential info. If a friendly audience can reverse a blur for bragging rights (and a $50 prize), imagine what motivated hackers or internet detectives might do when they spot something juicy being masked out.

As one commenter wryly noted, the best way to keep a secret is not to film it in the first place. The internet’s collective brainpower is immense, and given the right hint, even a heavily pixelated mystery can be unraveled overnight.

If you do plan to use pixelation in your own videos (just for entertertainment purposes, for example, like creating a "blurry face" effect), here's how you can easily do it in Movavi Video Editor:

1. Import your video by either dragging and dropping it into the timeline or clicking on the Add Files button.
2. Once your video is on the timeline, go the More tools section and choose the Highlight and conceal option.
3. Click the variant you like (you'll see the change on the player screen on the right side). Move it to the area of your video that you want to blur and adjust the size.
4. You can also change things like opacity, feathering, outline, and even add motion tracking.