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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of those color gradients in the photos? [1] Are they supposed to conceal the chip? If so, that didn't work very well. [2] Just make it completely black, people have failed often enough to properly redact information because they tried to do something fancy, something more visually pleasing. At least unless they did this intentionally, either because they wanted it to be visible but also wanted some deniability as an accident, or to mislead by embedding false information.

[1] https://payatu.com/static/images/remoteblogs/arun/emfi_blog/...

[2] http://www.unisoc.com/sc9863a

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Ouch. That was not an intended one. Those colourful overlays are just android stickers. I didn't expect them to be translucent. . :( I fixed it. I would kindly request you to modify / remove the link part please . :(

>I would kindly request you to modify / remove the link part please . :(

But... why?

This might give out information about the device we used. That should be a secret.

If MDM is deployed by companies, the device may come from the author's employer, friend's employer, government? Memory ref + CPU ref makes it somewhat identifiable.

If you think the numbers on the chip contain some personally identifiable information: fear not, they are generally just part numbers and sometimes date codes.

If that's not the reason for trying to redact them, what is the reason? I can't think of anything else reasonable.

EDIT: I now realise that this was a very condescending comment to write to someone who, based on the submitted blog post, is considerably better at electronics than I am. Sorry about that!

That's now unfortunately too late, I can no longer edit or delete the comment, maybe one of the mods can censor it. And by the way, you added a new photo to the article but the original file is still there, following the link in my comment still yields the photo with the visible part number. There might very well be people out there that notice that the article has 1.png, 2.png, 3.png, 44.png, an image with something hidden, and then 5.jpg [1] and then start to wonder what 4.png or 4.jpg might look like.

[1] Yes, there are also 5.png, 6.png, and 8.png in between out of order, it is not a perfect pattern, but it is still close enough that one might notice the missing 4.png.

the blog poster can edit the image on their own site right?

But they can not get the link to the chip out of my comment.

No worries mate. Sorted! Doesn't matter as of now.

It's also on the Internet Achieve.

IMHO - We want to encourage people to write and share these blog posts. Its now fixed and would be polite to remove the links.

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