February 11, 2026
Your blur tool is snitching
It's All a Blur
Internet freaks out after learning blurred photos can be “un-blurred” — and the comments get dark fast
TLDR: Blurring an image can sometimes be reversed, meaning those “censored” faces and texts might not be so safe. Commenters are split between panic over real un-blurring cases and experts insisting it only works under perfect conditions, but everyone agrees: stop trusting blur for serious privacy.
Forget fancy hacking – today’s paranoia starter is your favorite blur tool. A new explainer shows how a simple “average the pixels” blur can be mathematically rewound, meaning that smugly smudged faces and covered text might not be as secret as you think. The author walks through how, if you know how the blur was done, you can step backwards and rebuild the original picture like solving a Sudoku.
The crowd immediately went from “wow, cool math” to “this is nightmare fuel.” One top commenter dragged in a real horror story: a predator who hid his face with a cartoon-style swirl in Photoshop – and was later exposed when someone just unswirled it. Another commenter pointed out the creepier angle: you don’t even need perfect math if you already know what’s behind the blur, like a familiar face or a hidden line of text in an obvious font.
Then the nerd-fight started. Some argued this stuff is fragile and falls apart with even a bit of noise, basically yelling, “Calm down, CSI doesn’t work in real life.” Others went full galaxy-brain, comparing blur to smooth water flow, saying once the “turbulence” (random chaos) kicks in, the info is gone for good. Meanwhile, photographers just wanted to know: can we fix our shaky, motion-blurred shots or not?
Key Points
- •A 1D moving-average blur (n=5) is used to analyze whether blurred images can be reconstructed.
- •By converting blurred averages to sums and subtracting adjacent sums, original pixel values can be derived when padding is known.
- •For a centered window, recovery yields gaps that require a second pass in the opposite direction.
- •A right-aligned moving average simplifies inversion: formulas allow iterative reconstruction of all pixels.
- •The demonstration shows deterministic blurs can retain recoverable information, making blur unreliable for secure redaction.