Smudge photos with Seashore

but tuaw isnt a word :D

@ streetstealth, You're probably right. The word of the day was -- wait for it -- TUAW. Sneaky, eh? Bet no one would have guessed it. ;-)

You can always do it the lo-tech way. Place a white sheet of paper over your monitor and lightly rub a pencil over the area you want revealed.

Well, to be fair, a *smudge* is quite different from a blur, which is to say that actually distorting the pixel information (as seen above) is far more secure than just resampling it (the classic pixel grid).

I don't think anyone's going to reconstruct the secret word of the day from that pic. :)

Photoshopping a black line "a Ham Sandwich" would not work as well as you think, since Photoshop embeds small thumbnails within working projects. This was made famous by Cat Schwartz of TechTV win her nude popped up.
Link on how, also link Not safe for work:
http://www.geocities.com/cat_nude/

wouldn't it make more sense just to use photoshop or some other app and paint a black box or something similar over the sensitive area? that way it can't be un-blurred. or am i missing something?

Not stupid at all. I knew it could be undone but wasn't sure how myself. Here's a little info on the method: http://dheera.net/projects/blur.php (The information at this site is a great reminder for why it's important to not put anything online you don't want seen, even if you think you've made it unreadable.)

Not to sound stupid... but how IS it undone?

Good! I was hoping someone would. And, it will come as a complete shock, I'm sure. :-)

I'm sharpening the image now to find out what the super secret word is. I will get back to you. :)