[siofra]

Beautiful walkthrough. The key insight people miss is that "looks unreadable to humans" and "is information-theoretically destroyed" are very different bars. The blur looks opaque because our visual system is bad at detecting small per-pixel differences, but the math does not care about our perception.

Same principle applies to other "looks safe" redactions — pixelation with small block sizes, partial masking of credentials, etc. If you can describe the transform as a linear operation, there is probably a pseudoinverse waiting to undo it.