Blurring and swirling are ineffective methods for obscuring media—they once caught a sexual abuser of children by "unswirling' his face—and unredacting pixelated text is now an all-but-solved problem.
So there's an existing tool called Depix that tries to do exactly this through a really clever process of looking up what permutations of pixels could have resulted in certain pixelated blocks, given a De Bruijn sequence of the correct font. I like the theory of this tool a lot, but a researcher at Jumpsec pointed out that perhaps it doesn't work as well in practice as you'd like. In real-world examples you're likely to get minor variations and noise that throws a wrench into the gears. They then issued a challenge to anyone, offering a prize if you could un-redact the following image. How could I refuse such a challenge?!
You must completely obliterate or replace the text. Keeping some quantum of the visual character of the secret text inherently █████ your ability to redact it.
Tip! Go back to published documents and media that were thusly redacted years ago, and make fresh news of them.
