Would this come down to a difference between raster graphics and vector graphics?
So wait, wait. Japan, the country that allows people to buy women’s panties from a vending machine at the subway station, won’t allow a guy to look at unpixelated vaginas on the internet? All right then.
No. Most Jpeg images contain some meta data that viewers ignore. You could encode where the pixelation occurs. Then the descrambler could operate on those regions. That is just one idea off the top of my head. There are tons of ways that someone could make an image reversibly corrupted that are time consuming for someone to reverse engineer. If I had the time and inclination I could probably come up with a scheme that did not need to use meta data.
In a ride through porn sites I landed at a profoundly disturbing Japanese scat site :eek:, and before I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, I saw that it pixellated out the genitals, but left in anii and all the rest, which struck me as odd in the extreme. (No cite, which is just as well.)
Nitpick: “anii”, if it were a word, would be the plural of “anius”, whatever that means. The rule for Latin plurals is just that the -us turns into -i. The only time you ever get a word ending in “ii” is if one of those "i"s is already there in the singular.
You’re forgetting the sideways vaginas. 
No, I really meant that the participants shown at the Japanese scat site were re-enacting Ovid, and two performances were going on.
Sorry. While it’s possible to purchase girls’ panties, such devices are not at subway stations or other public locations.
Note that I said “girl’s” and not “women’s.” All reports I’ve heard about concern selling high school girls’ underwear. There was a big hit about it in the early 90s but subsequently made illegal in various prefectures.
As to the question if the vending machines actually exist or not, it seems possible that they do. Snopes claims it’s true, but base that on people reporting them, which can be questionable. The image on a web search are not conclusive, and at least one image is clearly mislabed in English as such, but a Youtube video seems to show one. However, the machine is clearly in the back of an adult DVD store.
Unfortunately, despite the user name I’m borely tame so most of my information comes from asking friends. Lately, most of my friends are fellow parents of babies and toddlers so this itopic just doesn’t come up as frequently.
That would be Christopher Neil, you can see a swirled picture on BBC news. Pictures of him with young boys appeared on the net, Interpol released copies after unswirling his face and he was caught.
There are plenty of ways to hide data in images, doing so is called steganography. I can easily imagine someone creating a system that required a key to “unlock” apparently pixelated images. I wouldn’t be surprised to find freely available programs to do so.
BTW, just to add something to this discussion: in recent years, I’ve been seeing a lot of Japanese adult movies online that are NOT censored. They’re not from different companies or anything-- same actors, same actresses, just unpixellated.
What’s the reason behind this? Can/do Japanese producers make pixellated versions for home distribution and unpixellated versions for foreign distribution? Or are the original versions, pre-pixellation, merely pirated/distributed to overseas distributors who turn around and release them?
A point that needs to be made is that doing things in a foreign language is hard. If you don’t speak the language, you might be able to find some porn, but it’s going to be a hassle. In end result, lots of Japanese people probably do end up on Japanese-only websites.
The primary person to come up with the idea of making a website for Japanese people, hosted outside of the country, would usually be a Japanese person. That I’ve seen, this really hasn’t happened. From the 1990s on, Japanese society has become horribly insular. The idea of going outside of the country to do something is fairly uncommon. Doing something which goes against the modus operandi is uncommon. Stores shut down in the train stations before rush hour, losing probably a good 30% of their possible daily income because “that’s when stores close.”
Overall yeah, you would expect to see people skirting the laws and providing full-on nudity to the Japanese people, but that would be if we were talking about Americans. Profit isn’t the primary driving force of society there in modern times.
I presume them to be sold/leaked overseas to be sold to whities.
But the swirl effect just puts pixels into different locations on the photo; it doesn’t get rid of any information.
Pixellation would take, say, 64 pixels and average them to one color. That would be three bytes of info to represent the information that used to be 192 bytes. That’s definitely a loss of information.
On the other hand, you could do something like reversing the order of the bits in that region, or rotating an entire square of 64 pixels 180 degrees, or the like. Any of those would give you an overall effect very similar to pixellation, but with no loss of information.
The pixellation is added in post production, after the scenes are edited so it would be possible to make a copy without pixellazation.
One of my customers used to work in post production including porn jobs, and said he kept personal copies of the pre-pixeled version. He was already out of the industry so I’ll accept his claim of not being responsible for any pirating.
What about those skirts with the asses drawn on them? How common are those?
No, no, I kid.
When you watch a TV show that blurs-out faces of people who didn’t give their permission, or blurs out product names on tee shirts, (or pixellated porn), etc., how does someone actually accomplish that blurring? I’m sure that someone doesn’t edit every frame separately, but how do they do it? Does the user define a blur size, then hold down his mouse button on the area to be blurred while the video plays in slo-mo? Or is it more automated?
Has anybody else wondered WHY the Japanese seem to tolerate (really bad) pornographic TV GameShows (like f**king Competitions, & ID’ing your GF from behind a board after groping & poking up to 6 other Ladies … &c), tolerate (by non-prevention / intervention of groping (actually, rape) of Girls on PublicTransit, have a seemingly perverse sense of Sexuality (as demonstrated by their Bukkake-centric / scataalogically-focussed / bondage-driven porn) … YET they pixellate the Pussy??? (& block the Cock, for that matter!)
Seems sorta, kinda off-centre to me. … & WHY do Japanese (& for that matter, lots of other Oriental) Girls insist on Keeping the Bush (albeit, trimmed) ??
. just some random thoughts / observations from a randy ole Bugger !!
For the most part they just wouldn’t think of doing such a thing. Their reaction to such an inquiry would be “Why?”. When I lived in Japan years ago, I never was with a girl that had even trimmed the area and some were shockingly hairy, but always very clean.
Taiwan was a little different in that the girls were less hairy, but again few if any even trimmed their area. Most, if not all, of the Taiwanese girls I met also did not shave their legs because they really didn’t have to. Their legs were virtually hairless.
I remember a series of videos called “An evening with the Japanese” on shock site Consumption Junction. Basically it was the most extreme, disgusting brand of scat porn with diarrhea (including live worms) eating.
The pubic hair was blurred :rolleyes:
Those effects wouldn’t be similar to pixellation. They wouldn’t hide anything.
Storing a jpeg with unlockable pixellation though is not hugely difficult, because additional data can be added either inside or outside the image data in a jpeg without affecting the appearance of the image.
I can’t seem to find a good link, but the ability to mask areas in video software and hardware is quite old.
Nowadays it is trivial for software to make a mask track a face (or anything else fairly well-defined) automatically. But back in the day someone would set the extent of the area once and then need to shift it in frames where the camera or subject moved. For video that needed to be hastily prepared, you’d often see this done quite badly.
As an aside, and thinking out loud…although pixellation is lossy, I wonder if it is possible to do a probabilistic analysis if you had enough subject movement between frames but limited camera movement. It would never be like a Hollywood “enhance” but I reckon in ideal circumstances you could make a pixellated face recognizable.