7 ms·
Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt
- mschuster91 3mo ago> # Hide the cursor \ tput civis Never thought I'd learn shell tricks from the back of a fast-fashion t-shirt, but here we are.
- FijiBY 3mo agoNice investigation, thx
- tantalor 3mo agoTIL Consolas is a Windows font
- rsr 3mo agomore like Tristan Shirt-liker, am I right?
- Tiberium 3mo agoOCRing this is a nightmare and is a good benchmark to any self-proclaimed good OCR/vision model. I think though it could likely be easily OCR'd if you give the image to any decent agentic harness with a good vision model, e.g. newest Claude/GPT ones, and tell them to split the image per lines, and then just OCR each line individually. I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation? There seem to be a lot of comments in it, but in this case it's still ok :)
- IshKebab 3mo agoDefinitely LLM. No humans write that many comments.
- Tiberium 3mo agoHonestly it's a bit of a shame. I checked and they could've shortened their base64 payload by 304 chars by removing all comments except the top two congratulatory ones, or by 524 if they removed those too.
- saidnooneever 3mo agoim just sad it didnt render a qr code leading to malware :'). the different ways ppl look at obfuscated codes and scripts hah
- OtherShrezzing 3mo agoWould they still get the highlighted "PEACE FOR ALL" text throughout the shortened string? It looks like the length, and presence of those characters, was an explicit design choice.
- lemagedurage 3mo agoMaybe they added the comments to get a longer payload for the sake of the shirt's design. The comments can be more cute/awe inspiring for people who aren't as familiar with bash but like solving puzzles as well.
- yborg 3mo agoThe HN optimizing T-shirt compiler is the next stage here :D
- petu 3mo agoHuman could write that many comments to get enough base64 text for a design. Maybe to even get some of the highlighted characters in places they want (roughly equally spaced apart).
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoAhem... My code usually clocs at 50/50 (or thereabouts)[0]. Has, since my very first real engineering project (in 1987)[1]. I discuss in detail, here[2]. But one reason that I like LLMs, is that they help me to write even more documentation. I have found that I can instruct an LLM to revise my documentation, and make it even more effective. [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (My GH profile. Pretty much everything there, is like that -has, since long before LLMs were a broken rubber on the drug store shelf). [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30194-Manual-1987.pdf https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30... (Downloads a PDF) [2] https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/ https://littlegreenviper.com/leaving-a-legacy/
- IshKebab 3mo agoYour code isn't as unnecessarily commented as this. E.g. look at this line https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner/blob/d44eedce9667eee14dd4693f284bae7a579e74b5/Sources/RVS_Spinner/RVS_Spinner.swift#L764 https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner/blob/d44ee... An LLM would have commented `// Create temporary UI view.` Completely redundant comments like this are a classic hallmark of LLMs: # Set frequency scaling factor freq=0.2 Dunno why I have been downvoted for stating the obvious. Also from my brief look at one file it looks like you have 50% comments because you have a gazillion comment separator lines.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoI didn't downvote. There's nothing wrong with your comment. It's just a bit silly, because humans definitely write that much. I learned from Apple and Adobe headerdocs. I worked for a Japanese company that accreted comments. Yeah, lots of whitespace.
- latexr 3mo ago> No humans write that many comments. Especially in a case like this, I would definitely write a lot of comments to aid in understanding, thus increasing trust so people would try it out and tinker with it.
- boomboomsubban 3mo agoPlus the main point of this code is to have people look at it, the function is secondary to being an easter egg.
- ivolimmen 3mo agoSince LLM's are mimicking our code my guess we do...
- NamlchakKhandro 3mo agoI do
- lemagedurage 3mo agoI don't think it was written by an LLM, some things stand out: The congratulations text is both in English and Japanese. Contains a single heart emoji. There was an intention to have a cyan to orange gradient, but the range starts in an ANSI block, ends halfway through the 256 color block and 256 terminal colors are not arranged like a gradient at all. There's no sleep at the end of the loop where I feel like an LLM would add that defensively.
- n2j3 3mo agoHuman here. I added a sleep 0.5 at the end, it's too fast to read otherwise. Makes for a nice terminal screensaver!
- INTPenis 3mo agoHi fellow human, I got the same idea. Just a sleep 0.1 before the echo "" makes it readable. Otherwise it scrolls way too fast.
- make3 3mo ago"the code is not quite detail oriented enough to be AI", times are changing
- DaSHacka 3mo agoMore like 'not boilerplate-y enough'
- lemagedurage 3mo agoEhh, AI makes plenty mistakes but they have a different vibe to it. In my mind an AI would do something the most popular way even when that's not appropriate. A human might do things in an unpopular way even when that's not appropriate.
- pkilgore 3mo agoFlawless, completely unnecessary abstraction is a better tell of LLM code than "comment clearly responding to a part of a prompt that I cannot see".
- OtherShrezzing 3mo agoSafari's copy-text-from-image feature manages the entire base64 part of the string, except for the first character (I instead of a T). Weirdly, it gets much worse performance if you try to copy the entire string, including the hashbang part. I wonder what it's doing under the hood to get such good performance?
- khurs 3mo agoDidn't know Safari had this. Looked it up, you put mouse over text, then just select and copy it - very cool! https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/safari/ibrw20183ad7/mac https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/safari/ibrw20183ad7/ma...
- agys 3mo agoPreview has it too… And it works extremely well.
- iamflimflam1 3mo agoThere’s a whole bunch of hidden features that no one seems to be aware of. Preview has pretty good background removal. Notes will transcribe audio from audio files.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- al_borland 3mo agoNotes will do OCR as well. Trigger the feature, point the camera at something, and it will input just the text.
- lostlogin 3mo agoNotes is amazing. Autocompleting equations, converting jpg to pdf and various other admin chores. The seamless cloud sync between devices is much appreciated too.
- netsharc 3mo agoThe last time Internet people were obsessed with OCRing some base64 was a few months ago when the DoJ released tons of emails from some guy who died, but they were released as rasterized PDFs. Can't remember his name now, there's been so many distractions...
- helterskelter 3mo agoAll I remember is that it had some to do with Bill Clinton sleeping with underage girls and Bill Gates with a nasty case of VD.
- netsharc 3mo agoI think there's also someone who's very close to him who currently has the reins of power in government... or you forgot about this? He even sent the now-deceased man a birthday card with some words that strongly suggest he knew what was going on..
- helterskelter 3mo agoHuh? You talking about Iran? (.../s)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- shakna 3mo ago> I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation? From the prototype shown here [0], and the way they talk about their process, I sincerely doubt it. Especially as they mention trying to make it hard for AI to handle the output. [0] https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=567 https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=567
- cb321 3mo agoI watched that whole video link - thank you for that - and he doesn't really say. In fact, he spends much more time on the beige color harkening to computer case plastics of the 80s & 90s. The AI not handling the output relates to the final base64 output on the T-shirt (which other comments in this thread mention manually keying in or TFA discusses in the context of OCR). So, that is just not relevant to the question. What made me start to wonder, personally, was that the output seems identical if you use "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" instead of the version with internal repeats. IF there is any point to that "manual expansion of the cycles", IMO that deserves a comment much more so than "# Calculate length of text; text_length=". Also, that `echo -n ...` followed by `echo ""` instead of just plain `echo` in the first place seems like the kind of copy-pasta code LLMs generate. Then again, regular devs also write pretty bad copy-pasta code. There is also this the weirdly "broken down" calculation with 3 `bc` invocations not 1 as if it was translated from a language with more arithmetic/special function power than bash. There is also the color scale stuff done in the loop instead of outside (except the one color=$(..)) which seems very unnatural and also very like machine translation. Also, at least for me, on my bash-5.3.15(1), `char="${text:t % text_length:1}"` does not work to slice out the multi-byte UTF8 heart symbols, but it sure does look like the kind of thing an LLM would do translating from a python3 script (such as something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669) into bash. Another thing is, as others here have observed, there is nothing "gradual" about the xterm-256 color cube. So, "gradient" is a misnomer and exactly the kind of weird things LLMs do when they cobble text together. Finally, all the tput stuff the script does instead of just "print x spaces" really smells like a human description of the side scroll in the video game graphic he shows inspired him somehow LLM-corrupted/complexified into the vertical scroll terminals do. None of this is conclusive, but the video mentions 2023..2025 as when he did it and given that he was a designer and his concerns more visual than code-oriented, I'd have to say I disagree with your sincere doubt and I do strongly suspect the decoded script was very likely LLM-circa2024-generated, possibly with light post-edits by hand.
- underyx 3mo agoI gave the photo to Opus 4.8 and it reconstructed the same script in one shot. Although it did say it had to correct some parts of it based on context where it suspected OCR mistakes.
- da_grift_shift 3mo ago>I wonder if the script itself was written by an LLM before obfuscation? I seem to recall seeing an Akamai-branded base64'd shell script on a white shirt pre-2021(?), so unless they've changed the code since then, I doubt it...
- justusthane 3mo agoWhat is it about this that makes it particularly hard to OCR?
- grumbelbart2 3mo ago> OCRing this is a nightmare and is a good benchmark to any self-proclaimed good OCR/vision model. It's not that difficult, our industrial OCR model read it correctly on its first attempt with default parameters. The characters are easily separable, there is no structured background (think expiration dates on yogurt aluminum lids) that confuses the reader, there is no almost-text-like texture anywhere that would clutter the result. The font is also nice and standard.
- mmooss 3mo agoCool. What's an industrial OCR model?
- grumbelbart2 3mo agoEssentially part of a machine vision software package, which in turn is computer vision specialized for factory automation. It's "industrial" because it was trained on such data (more expiration dates and SEMI-font on wafers, less random pictures of streets with some text). That, plus engineering and support: a robust implementation, deployment on almost any system, fast and good long-term support so your factory doesn't stop for too long if something goes wrong etc.
- mmooss 3mo agoMakes sense. I wonder if there's anything in the technology that would benefit people scanning books or those scanning random things with their phones. Maybe better for low contrast or degraded print? (Obviously those applications don't need the engineering and support, and probably would not be a good fit for your company.)
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoThose of us who grew up in the 8-bit era would have just typed it in, carefully, in silence, with no-one allowed to enter or leave the room until we were done ;-)
- fennecfoxy 3mo agoIs it? Android tap and hold/image text select one-shotted it in 2 seconds.
- richstokes 3mo agoIs it a nightmare? I pasted the first, zoomed out, image of the shirt into ChatGPT, and it decoded it / let me know what the bash script does in one shot
- bryanrasmussen 3mo agoWhy does the shirt have an obfuscated bash script on the back?
- Tiberium 3mo agoBecause it's by Akamai, the blog links to https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/uniqlo-adds-new-akamai-tshirt-to-peace-for-all-collection https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/uniqlo-adds-ne...
- kay_o 3mo agoUniqlo frequently does collaborations. This was one with a tech company
- wbh1 3mo agoIt's at least the second one that Akamai's done, although I like this newest one the most. The old one was: https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E459561-000/00 https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E459561-000/00
- pezezin 3mo agoI have both of them and wear them to work regularly xD The guy who founded the new political party Team Mirai also wears it frequently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahiro_Anno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahiro_Anno
- high_byte 3mo agowhat if it contained a zero day for tesseract and the script you thought you got is just a throwaway
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dylanzhangdev 3mo agoCool! I bought one a few months ago as soon as I spotted it at a Uniqlo store, and later ordered a larger size online—I really love wearing them. But it never occurred to me to look into the story behind them.
- haileys 3mo agoI thought it was funny that the author used a variety of OCR tools with mixed success before spending a lot of time manually fixing up the output from the best one, rather than just typing it in
- mayas_ 3mo ago"just typing it" would be more error prone for the average human
- t-3 3mo agoNot really. Transcribing long sequences of nonsense is annoying but quite easy to do without error as long you're patient enough to follow a simple process of reading, typing, and double-checking character-by-character.
- rtldg 3mo agoTook me almost 2 minutes for 4 lines (and I missed a character in one of them!). I would opt for OCR too, obviously so I'm prepared for the next bash t-shirt I'd come across...
- OtherShrezzing 3mo agoI think this is a case where two people can successfully complete the task manually faster than one attempting to automate it. Get a ruler, read five centimetres of characters to your colleague, have them type it in as you go, then repeat that five centimetres back to you. Correct as you go. Format your string with the same line-breaks as the t-shirt, and remove them at the end, so you can be sure you've got the correct length on each row. Trial-and-error adjust the five-cm distance depending on your success rate as you go along All in, you should have a non-corrupted string in 10-15 min.
- christoph 3mo agoThat was also my thought… but I grew up mashing rubber keys for hours copying “games” out of magazines and books! Then hours after fixing all the typos!
- DrewADesign 3mo ago> I guess Uniqlo is run through Windows though: one thing that struck me was the font, which I’m almost certain is Consolas, Surely this would use whatever font the virtual terminal profile was set to? I don’t know of any method to choose a virtual terminal font from bash and don’t see any code that addresses it?
- nisiddharth 3mo agoThey're referring to the font on the T-shirt.
- tym0 3mo agoThank you for spelling it out for me because I thought I was looking at a completely hallucinated AI article...
- speerer 3mo agoAuthor here. All hallucinations are my own. Now you point it out, I see why the jump in context from the terminal back to the tshirt font would give the wrong impression.
- tym0 3mo agoHonestly it was quite a whiplash to go from what looked like a good article to something that seemed completely made up. But I would chalk that up more to my reading comprehension than your writing.
- DrewADesign 3mo agoI didn’t read it as generated text, but the context definitely threw me.
- DrewADesign 3mo agoAh, I see. I’m sure the clothing designer that actually made the design couldn’t care less about technical consistency and was just looking for something ‘tech’ looking that also read well in that design context in that medium.
- world2vec 3mo agoOh wow I saw that tshirt at the store and said to my girlfriend "no way that script is functional, probably just for show". I should have persevered.
- actionfromafar 3mo agoAn easy miss. :-) Most of the time our thoughts are on autopilot, since we are not calm.
- tancop 3mo ago[dead]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- doppp 3mo agoThanks for the post! Love Easter Eggs like these!
- lloydatkinson 3mo agoP ./cool.sh: line 31: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 34: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 37: bc: command not found E ./cool.sh: line 31: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 34: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 37: bc: command not found Very wow. Shame they assumed everyone has "bc"...
- greazy 3mo agoWhich distro are you running? Perchance did you run the shell script in alpine Linux (docker)?
- piacos_ 3mo agoit doesn't seem to be installed on my endeavouros laptop
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- lloydatkinson 3mo agoDebian.
- cb321 3mo agoThere is a python3 variant in this thread [1], but if that is not "standard enough" (as someone else may have mentioned bash itself is not POSIX), this awk would also work { Warning - this awk is 1000s of times faster than the bash. So, you really probably want that sleep { and sure 100s of times faster yet may be possible. } }: #!/usr/bin/awk -f BEGIN { # Split on spaces so multi-byte utf8 works nText = split("♥ P E A C E ♥ F O R ♥ A L L", tmp, " ") for (i = 0; i < nText; i++) text[i] = tmp[i + 1] color0 = 12; color1 = 208 # xterm-256 color cube range nColor = color1 - color0 # Could be a pretty gradient w = ENVIRON["COLUMNS"]; if (w == "") w = 80 h = ENVIRON["LINES"]; if (h == "") h = 24 freq = 0.2 for (t = 0; 1; t++) { x = int(w/2 + w/4*sin(t*freq) + 0.5) # x pos ~ sine color = color0 + int((nColor*t)/h)%nColor # cycle colors ch = text[t % nText] # cycle chars printf("%*s\033[38;5;%dm%s\033[m\n", x, "", color, ch) fflush() # system("sleep 0.1") # awk has no builtin sleep } } As to "bug reports", the T-shirt published script also fails with LC_ALL=C for me as mentioned else-thread. FWIW, I think ancient practice to reach for `bc` instead of `awk` or even the arithmetic built into shells often annoys. The only reason I keep `bc` installed at all is to compile Linux kernels. Someone had some patch set to Linux to eliminate this very dependency many years ago now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830669
- icevl 3mo agoBase64 without error correction turns the t-shirt itself into a lossy transport layer, so the OCR/transcription step becomes the actual challenge.
- l337h4x0rz 3mo agothere's no newline between the shebang and the actual code
- brazzy 3mo agoAfter being primed by the article, I read the author's name as "Shirtliker"...
- speerer 3mo agoThat's a new one and oddly apt :)
- wbh1 3mo agoI love this shirt! Here's a nice video from the actual designer about the process of making this shirt (including intentionally making it hard to OCR): https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=526 https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=526
- speerer 3mo agoAuthor here. Thank you so much for the link which I hadn't seen! I'm very happy to see this and I'm gratified that it was deliberately difficult to OCR, not just me.
- heresie-dabord 3mo agoAs much as I hope for Peace, I would have suggested echo "Fgnaq+sbe+Qrzbpenpl!" | tr 'A-Za-z+' 'N-ZA-Mn-za-m '
- criddell 3mo agoIt would probably be quicker to type it in than figure out how to OCR it. It would be like typing in a game from a COMPUTE! magazine 45 years go. https://archive.org/details/1983-01-compute-magazine/page/96/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/1983-01-compute-magazine/page/96...
- wildzzz 3mo agoAt least that stuff was written in cleartext. You'd immediately know you just typed the wrong character if you saw PRONT on your screen.
- marcus_holmes 3mo agoThis was my reaction! OCR? oh my sweet summer child, you cannot know the days we spent typing in raw code from a magazine, and the joy when it finally ran.
- VladVladikoff 3mo agoI watched the link but I didn’t see where he talked about making it difficult to OCR? What exactly was done that made it difficult to OCR?
- khurs 3mo agoBrilliant marketing when you can get people to pay to walk around advertising with your logo!!
- kijin 3mo agoWell at least they're not instructing consumers to run curl | bash. That's better than half the tech howtos out there.
- INTPenis 3mo agoNo, they're instructing their customers to run unknown base64 encoded code instead. :D
- bigfishrunning 3mo agoThey should have just had the base64 block and forced you to decode and read it before running it, rather then having the `eval` bit at the beginning...
- kijin 3mo agoBut that wouldn't have looked like a bash script, only a random sequence of characters. The shebang at the start definitely contributes to the geek factor.
- qiqitori 3mo agoI once wrote a tool that helps with finding mistakes in OCR'd fixed width text, https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-monospace-text-and-verifying-the-result/ https://blog.qiqitori.com/2023/03/ocring-hex-dumps-or-other-... Basically it just clusters same characters and asks the human to find the problems, which is easy when you're looking at a series of pictures like ssssss5sss. The UI is kinda least-effort. Should ask a modern AI agent to make it look nice and intuitive, sometime maybe.
- breppp 3mo agoFeels very reminiscent of the style of old DeCSS tshirts https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt/ https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...
- chrysoprace 3mo agoMy old colleague had one with a Go program[0] which I always thought was quite cool. [0] https://github.com/GL-Kageyama/UNIQLO_Akamai_T-shirt_Code https://github.com/GL-Kageyama/UNIQLO_Akamai_T-shirt_Code
- mdgld 3mo agoI wasn’t sure if you meant a Go solver or Go the language. Would be fun if someone wrote a Go program in Go
- psd1 3mo agoOr a pong clone in Racket.
- ExoticPearTree 3mo agoI got one this year with the Go code. Never actually thought it is legit code, just some random stuff.
- yogorenapan 3mo agoSaw this the other day on the train, and probably stared a bit too hard at the dude wearing it. Surprised to see this on HN so soon after. World feels like a simulation
- preetham_rangu 3mo agoThe real threat model here isn't the base64 payload, it's Uniqlo turning a T-shirt into a QR code that requires a human OCR pipeline to redeem.
- huflungdung 3mo ago[dead]
- shim__ 3mo agoCould have saved 50% with 'base64 -d | gzip -d'
- speerer 3mo agoMaybe useful for those XS sizes.
- cb321 3mo agoFor anyone that cares, this is a slightly less stupid Python version: #!/usr/bin/env python3 from os import environ; E = environ.get from math import sin from time import sleep text = "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" # The text to sine-scroll animate nText = len(text) # Number of utf8 chars freq = 0.2 # Frequency scaling factor color0 = 12 # xt256 Color cube segment 12..<208 color1 = 208; nColor = color1 - color0 (w, h) = (int(E("COLUMNS", 80)), int(E("LINES", 24))) t = 0 while True: x = (w/2) + (w/4)*sin(t*freq) # x pos via sine value x = max(0, min(w - 1, int(x + 0.5))) # bound to tty width color = color0 + ((nColor*t)//h)%nColor # cycle colors ch = text[t%nText] # Get char & Use xterm-256 color escs print("%*s\033[38;5;%sm%s\033[m\n" % (x, "", color, ch)) t += 1 sleep(0.1) # original used bc shell outs to rate-limit As mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830634 , the heart symbols did not otherwise even work for my bash and some have commented on liking the screen saver.
- conductr 3mo agoYou should base64 it and sell tshirts
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- _flux 3mo agoOn one hand it's nice how it's clean and commented, but on the other hand some golfing could have made the encoded block a lot more reasonable to actually manually enter.
- estebarb 3mo ago"Uniqlo x Akamai sells another design of shirt in the same range which is plainly incomplete" Imagine having to return a t-shirt because that malfunction! — I don't understand why are you returning this, was the size wrong or you didn't like it? — No, there is a syntax error at line 37 that makes it impossible to run, and I'm concerned people on the street may think I promote unsafe bash scripting.
- cromka 3mo agoOh the Karens these days!
- Octoth0rpe 3mo agoSurely such a person would use the spelling k@r3n
- basilikum 3mo agoK4R311
- NonHyloMorph 3mo agoThats the one
- amatecha 3mo ago|<4r3∫\∫ .. was trying to think of a way to somehow incorporate "k-rad" but couldn't figure anything out haha ( https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=k-rad https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=k-rad )
- _joel 3mo agoWorked on my torso
- arikrahman 3mo agoNot everyone has a 6 pack sir!
- brightball 3mo agoNice! Might have to do something like that for a verse on the next Carolina Code Conference shirt. Been trying to figure out a good way to pull in cybersecurity.
- sixtyj 3mo ago> Interesting. I told my wife "that’s basically how people ship viruses’ and bought it. It’s a movie plot.
- willejs 3mo agoLooks like it has a few shellcheck issues, and no set -euo pipefail? ;)
- koiueo 3mo ago> I ran OCR in a few ways: First, using the built-in OCR of the circle-to-search feature on Android, which is often very good. Second, by using Tesseract with a few options and tweaks. And third by running it through Claude. After diffing the three to look for mismatches and getting Claude to output a table of locations for quick scanning, it became trivial but time-consuimg to tidy up the remainder I bet 10$ I'd spend less time typing it from the t-shirt. And I wouldn't boil two kettles of water in the process. But hey, AI makes you 10x more productive, I suppose
- freedomben 3mo agoYou may want to retract that bet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830846
- koiueo 3mo agoYeah, I read that later. My bet is against manual OCR with various engines + finding mistakes later using an LLM.
- bigfishrunning 3mo agoI'd rather find the mistakes with my human brain. Keeps me limber. I might even accidentally learn something.
- speerer 3mo ago(Author here) for unrelated reasons my typing is very slow at the moment, so I was keen to automate. I see that people are getting different results from Claude than I did though.
- devnull810 3mo ago[dead]
- alexpotato 3mo agoFascinating that we have base64 but not error correction for it!
- chrisweekly 3mo agoGreat post! It's interesting, detailed but concise, and well-written. Also, I appreciate the "no cookies or tracking" and attractive, functional and performant site design.
- teo_zero 3mo agoI don't know... I prefer unobfuscated text that you can immediately grok. The other day I saw this on a T-shirt: > May the m×s/t² be with you
- jolmg 3mo agoWouldn't be interesting enough to nerd-snipe people.
- forinti 3mo agoThis reminds me of a T-shirt I once saw that read: perl -e ' "$a="etbjxntqrdke"; $a=~s/(.)/chr(ord($1)+1)/eg; print "$a\n;"' It's cursing. Don't run it if it might offend you. Upon seeing this, I decided to golf and came up with a shorter version: perl -e "print chr 1+ ord for split //,'etbjxntqrdke'"
- librasteve 3mo agoor raku -e 'say "etbjxntqrdke".comb.map({chr .ord + 1}).join'
- lizmat 3mo agoor raku -e 'say "etbjxntqrdke".comb.map(*.succ).join'
- srejk 3mo agoThis is just a ROT1, so perl -pe'y/a-z/b-za/'<<<etbjxntqrdke
- forinti 3mo agoThat makes for a cool rot13: /a-z/n-za-m/
- librasteve 3mo agoraku -pe 'tr/a..z/b..za/' <<< etbjxntqrdke
- BeatrizPerez 3mo ago[dead]
- khernandezrt 3mo agoIve been to 3 Uniqlos in my are and i havent been blessed with a bash shirt :(
- dolmen 3mo agoConsider ordering online. I see the product in the Uniqlo France store: https://www.uniqlo.com/fr/fr/products/E480814-000/00?colorDisplayCode=30&sizeDisplayCode=004 https://www.uniqlo.com/fr/fr/products/E480814-000/00?colorDi...
- raffael_de 3mo agowhile base64 can be considered obfuscation in this context and its inverse as decoding I can't help but feel this title is overselling and catering to a rather cyber-cheesy marketing campaign at that.
- ape4 3mo agoYeah, its a bit of a cheat. The best obfuscated C programs have the source looking like a Christmas tree (or something) and then play an xmas song (or whatever)
- raffael_de 3mo agothe base64 thing they did feels like a cheap version of that green-obscure-symbols-raining-on-a-terminal animation in The Matrix. should have gone with "Hack the Planet" instead ...
- cb321 3mo agoThat Matrix visual was actually specifically mentioned as an inspiration in the video by the designer being linked to/discussed elsethread (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830326 )
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Gabrys1 3mo agoI don't understand the font bit. This is a terminal script, it uses the font that your terminal uses?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- creaturemachine 3mo agoWhat Bash blog would be complete without some Windows trash-talk?
- SebRollen 3mo agoThey're talking about the font on the shirt
- Gabrys1 3mo agoah... thank you
- LeifCarrotson 3mo agoYour terminal doesn't typically use Consolas. You can do: $ wget https://archive.org/download/PowerPointViewer_201801/PowerPointViewer.exe $ cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe $ cabextract ppviewer.cab $ open CONSOLA*.TTF and use Consolas on Linux, but it's not available by default. What they're suggesting is that a lot of their users are logging into an Akamai Linux box from a Windows machine, and therefore aren't "real Linux geeks".
- wyldfire 3mo agoThat "beige box" term is not the beige box I was thinking of at first. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box_(phreaking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box_(phreaking)
- olooney 3mo agoIf you enjoy this kind of thing, you might also like Martin Kleppe's work, such as the Quine Clock: https://aem1k.com/qlock/ https://aem1k.com/qlock/ I reverse engineered it to a unobfuscated version a few years ago: https://gist.github.com/olooney/a89db3932b089925b71b68d7e9f27bbb https://gist.github.com/olooney/a89db3932b089925b71b68d7e9f2... He's done a ton of other great ASCII visualizations as well: https://aem1k.com/ https://aem1k.com/
- esquivalience 3mo agoThis is really cool, and I appreciated your reverse engineering.
- MattDamonSpace 3mo agoIs that really a Quine edit: it’s impressive as all hell but like
- circuit10 3mo agoNot by the definition on Wikipedia at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Source_code_inspection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Source_code_...
- raphlinus 3mo agoThe font is Roboto Mono, not Consolas. There's something else a lot stranger going on, though. It is a proper monospace font, but the typesetting on the shirt is not. There's some kerning going on (I noticed it especially in the 'Iy' pair), and also it appears that narrower characters such as 'i' take less horizontal space. If I had to guess, I would say that it was set with a tool such as "optical kerning" in InDesign.
- somat 3mo agoHas anyone ever made a monospace font with dynamic kerning? Which is a silly thing I never thought of until I read the above comment. This sounds nonsensical at first glance(and it may be) but hear me out. We use monospace fonts for a reason, they stack in a grid nicely. But within the confines of that grid there is room to shift a character left or right a bit which may lead to a nicer to read monospace. (it is equally likely to lead to a hideous mess, every time a letter would shift left it would leave a larger space right)
- roblabla 3mo agoMonaspace has a feature called "texture healing" that does something similar: it allows bigger letters to "steal" space from adjascent smaller letters, to make it easier to read. The result is that the letters are still in a grid, while still allowing for bigger letters to "breathe". https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Texture%20Healing.md https://github.com/githubnext/monaspace/blob/main/docs/Textu... It's the main reason I use monaspace as a font.
- gavinray 3mo agoWhat a brilliant idea, neat. Thanks for the link.
- bityard 3mo agoI'm open to trying it, but my gosh, having one 'w' offset slightly by a few pixels from the one right above it feels like it would drive me bonkers eventually. And: doesn't this result in text that "jumps around" as you type?
- pacofonix 3mo agoFor a non English locale that use comma instead of dot for decimals (in my case, Spanish), this script is partially crashing. Run using something like `chmod +x shirt.sh; LC_NUMERIC=C ./shirt.sh`.
- moralestapia 3mo agoThanks for doing this, I almost bought it just to decode it, lol.
- mk_stjames 3mo agoNeat. My only critique of the script is that I would have added a sleep 0.1 in the loop so that as this prints in a terminal it is actually readable; any modern terminal will scroll so fast you can't see the message in flight. Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.
- whartung 3mo agoMaybe you can sew a patch into it?
- 9dev 3mo agoHuh! I was sure the copy-text-from-image feature in MacOS would handle this flawlessly. But the best run I managed produced the following: base64: stdin: (null): error decoding base64 input stream #!/bin/bash # Congratulations! You found thu eastur ugg!#B��O�� # おめでとう��M�ぇM�す！隣C��わM�サ�#ライ����見でM�������！O�� # Define thu tuxt to anima|e text="♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALOB��PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♵PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♥" # Get termb�al dmmensions cols=$(tput cols) linus=$(tput lines)
- NikxDa 3mo agoSuper cool, especially that the code is annotated! In case the author is reading: The decorative feather images are between 2MB to almost 5MB in size. Compression might be in order to save users time and bandwidth, and make the site look less broken while the images are partially loaded :)
- thomaslwang 3mo agoThis reminds me of the old "code on a shirt" tradition - MIT used to sell shirts with Lisp one-liners. What I find interesting is that the script actually runs. Most of these novelty shirts just print something that looks like code but is meaningless. The fact that someone at Akamai went through the trouble of writing a self-evaluating obfuscated script for a retail product is either a great prank or someone's pet project that made it to production.
- felineflock 3mo agoPhew! I was hoping it was not a novel way of spreading a malicious script!
- mgaunard 3mo agohow is it obfuscated? It's literally written as plain black monospace text on a white background. Pretty sure any AI can solve it in 20 seconds.
- sanmarzano 3mo agoIt’s encoded not obfuscated. It’s even commented, which is the opposite of obfuscated. Plus it’s not really an Easter egg that was found: it is literally printed in a shirt. Easter eggs are supposed to be hidden and either only found by insider knowledge or deep investigation. This was neither.
- nico 3mo agoVery cool. It reminded me of the DeCSS t-shirts, which had source code with the decryption keys for DVDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
- exabrial 3mo ago(:(){ :|:& };:) This seems to work pretty well
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- thenthenthen 3mo agoMy japanese friends say: yes because uniqlo is a science company not a clothing company
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- duggan 3mo agoI do like these sorts of things; decoded a less exciting one from a bottle of wine I found in 2019. Significantly more eye-watering without OCR: https://xcancel.com/duggan/status/1130920846304993282 https://xcancel.com/duggan/status/1130920846304993282
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoWhats going on with Uniqlo? Is it still popular in the US?
- Brian_K_White 3mo agoI want to submit a pr to s/SIGINT/0 You want to do that cleanup regardless why you exit.
- busymom0 3mo ago> I’ve no idea at all how many views this site gets, but I’m willing to bet it’s not even double-digit humans per month. I'd take that bet considering it's got close to thousand upvotes and on front page of HN
- kotberg 3mo ago[dead]
- onraglanroad 3mo agoThere is so much there that could be code golfed. I'm tempted to try when I'm back. Anyone done it already though?
- jack_pp 3mo agoLove the font on the blog
- _kst_ 3mo agoThe image shows the `eval` on the same line as the `#!/bin/bash`. It should be on a separate line. #!/bin/bash eval "$(base64 -d <<< '...
- grepsedawk 3mo agoThis is so sick!
- lz400 3mo agoI have this tshirt. I'm relieved it's not a cognitohazard, virus or something, thanks!
- jnaina 3mo ago[dead]
- tiagod 3mo ago>peace for all >akamai ha!
- episode404 3mo ago> Calling base64 encoding obfuscation I was expecting some cool js deobfuscation tricks, so to put nicely I’ll just say that my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
- jibal 3mo agoI used to work for the first CDN company, Sandpiper Networks Inc. Akamai drank our milkshake.
- webprofusion 3mo agoI have the one with Go code on it, unfortunately I don't think that one would even compile.
- 0ld 3mo agoso they presume there is bash in my system, and it is under /bin well, i guess no peace for me then
- pixelpanic360 3mo agoWho ever keen to buy here is the link: https://www.uniqlo.com/uk/en/products/E480814-000/00?colorDisplayCode=30&sizeDisplayCode=004 https://www.uniqlo.com/uk/en/products/E480814-000/00?colorDi... (UK) https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E480814-000/00?srsltid=AfmBOoo2ryncgqTGOreuh5jai01klf73WX50kX3oClnvehyPuEipgR40 https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E480814-000/00?srsltid... (US)
- sharyphil 3mo agoI love this thread for the sheer amount of humor and knowledge. Good to be a part of this community.
- zeumo 3mo agoNeat, I'm wearing that exact shirt right at the moment I see this on the front page! I typed it out myself, and I liked the comment in Japanese text, which sort of added another layer of obfuscation (even though pasting it in an online decoder was trivial, it still was something more to decode, a level deeper). Also, I can now spot non-ASCII blobs in base64-encoded text, which is a skill I hadn't ever considered was possible before.
- throwaway270925 3mo agoDoes anyone know, is there something like base64 but with error correction?
- jsonc 3mo agoi bought this tshirt in tokyo (goes to uniqlo tokyo despite having uniqlo at home), i also thought it looked like malware so i bought it :D happy to see that the base64 was valid and did something cool! ^_^
- mpascale00 3mo agoSeems like this post might have put them out of stock.
- _spduchamp 3mo agoSo glad I clicked this random HN item, because now I learned about tput.
- cyberelf77 3mo ago[flagged]
- riccardik 3mo agothis is great, who designed it really has put some effort in it
- zftnb666 3mo agoFinally, a fashion brand that understands their target audience: people who debug bash for fun.