Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

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• Hacker News
• Very 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

  by nico
• This 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'"

  by forinti
• or

    raku -e 'say "etbjxntqrdke".comb.map({chr .ord + 1}).join'

  by librasteve
• I 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-...

  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.

  by qiqitori
• Neat. 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.

  by mk_stjames
• Maybe you can sew a patch into it?
  by whartung
• My 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

  by chrysoprace
• I got one this year with the Go code. Never actually thought it is legit code, just some random stuff.
  by ExoticPearTree
• I wasn’t sure if you meant a Go solver or Go the language. Would be fun if someone wrote a Go program in Go
  by mdgld
• Saw 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
  by yogorenapan
• I 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
  by haileys
• I'm guilty of this, but for me this kind of thing is optimizing over annoyance rather than time.
  by duskdozer
• (Author here) Yes I agree. It was a fun side-quest though. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1205/
  by speerer
• Gemini3.5 Flash didn't have a problem OCR'ing and base64 decoding it, despite the OCR step having errors, it just fixed them in the base64 decoding step.
  by grumbel
• "just typing it" would be more error prone for the average human
  by mayas_
• Feels like my experienced reality of task automation in corporate environments. We routinely have engineers spend 40+ hours automating tasks that an entry level person can do manually in 10 minutes and only need to be done weekly. Automation at all costs seems to be the future
  by conductr
• Took 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...
  by rtldg
• I ran it through paddle paddle OCR and it flawlessly did it. Google's OCR through my phone's Google lens had also worked at getting a very good extraction but not 100% correct. Definitely would spend less time fixing it than hand copying.

  IDK what the author was using but I feel like he could have shared how his OCR attempt went, but I am thinking he tried some naive OCR tools.

  by acters
• That 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!
  by christoph
• Oh 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.
  by world2vec
• An easy miss. :-) Most of the time our thoughts are on autopilot, since we are not calm.
  by actionfromafar
• OCRing 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 :)

  by Tiberium
• >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...

  by da_grift_shift
• I 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.
  by underyx
• > 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

  by shakna
• Those 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 ;-)
  by ErroneousBosh
• Safari'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?

  by OtherShrezzing
• > 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.

  by grumbelbart2
• The 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...

  by netsharc
• I 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.

  by lemagedurage