Huh! I was sure the copy-text-from-image feature in MacOS would handle this flawlessly. But the best run I managed produced the following:

    base64: stdin: (null): error decoding base64 input stream
    #!/bin/bash
    
    # Congratulations! You found thu eastur ugg!#B��O��
    # おめでとう��M�ぇM�す！隣C��わM�サ�#ライ����見でM�������！O��
    
    # Define thu tuxt to anima|e
    text="♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALOB��PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♵PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL♥PEACE♵FOR♵ALL♥"
    
    # Get termb�al dmmensions
    cols=$(tput cols)
    linus=$(tput lines)

"Uniqlo x Akamai sells another design of shirt in the same range which is plainly incomplete"

Imagine having to return a t-shirt because that malfunction!

— I don't understand why are you returning this, was the size wrong or you didn't like it?

— No, there is a syntax error at line 37 that makes it impossible to run, and I'm concerned people on the street may think I promote unsafe bash scripting.

Neat. My only critique of the script is that I would have added a

  sleep 0.1 

Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, you might also like Martin Kleppe's work, such as the Quine Clock:

https://aem1k.com/qlock/

I reverse engineered it to a unobfuscated version a few years ago:

https://gist.github.com/olooney/a89db3932b089925b71b68d7e9f2...

He's done a ton of other great ASCII visualizations as well:

https://aem1k.com/

The font is Roboto Mono, not Consolas.

There's something else a lot stranger going on, though. It is a proper monospace font, but the typesetting on the shirt is not. There's some kerning going on (I noticed it especially in the 'Iy' pair), and also it appears that narrower characters such as 'i' take less horizontal space. If I had to guess, I would say that it was set with a tool such as "optical kerning" in InDesign.

I love this shirt! Here's a nice video from the actual designer about the process of making this shirt (including intentionally making it hard to OCR): https://youtu.be/jocGLiecpjU?t=526

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 :)

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.

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;"'

Upon seeing this, I decided to golf and came up with a shorter version:

  perl -e "print chr 1+ ord for split //,'etbjxntqrdke'"

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

while base64 can be considered obfuscation in this context and its inverse as decoding I can't help but feel this title is overselling and catering to a rather cyber-cheesy marketing campaign at that.

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.

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

For a non English locale that use comma instead of dot for decimals (in my case, Spanish), this script is partially crashing. Run using something like `chmod +x shirt.sh; LC_NUMERIC=C ./shirt.sh`.

That "beige box" term is not the beige box I was thinking of at first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige_box_(phreaking)

Great post! It's interesting, detailed but concise, and well-written. Also, I appreciate the "no cookies or tracking" and attractive, functional and performant site design.

> I guess Uniqlo is run through Windows though: one thing that struck me was the font, which I’m almost certain is Consolas,

Surely this would use whatever font the virtual terminal profile was set to? I don’t know of any method to choose a virtual terminal font from bash and don’t see any code that addresses it?

> Interesting. I told my wife "that’s basically how people ship viruses’ and bought it.

It’s a movie plot.

I don't understand the font bit. This is a terminal script, it uses the font that your terminal uses?

For anyone that cares, this is a slightly less stupid Python version:

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    from os   import environ; E = environ.get
    from math import sin
    from time import sleep
    text = "♥PEACE♥FOR♥ALL" # The text to sine-scroll animate
    nText  = len(text)      # Number of utf8 chars
    freq   = 0.2            # Frequency scaling factor
    color0 = 12             # xt256 Color cube segment 12..<208
    color1 = 208; nColor = color1 - color0
    (w, h) = (int(E("COLUMNS", 80)), int(E("LINES", 24)))
    t = 0
    while True:
        x = (w/2) + (w/4)*sin(t*freq)           # x pos via sine value
        x = max(0, min(w - 1, int(x + 0.5)))    # bound to tty width
        color = color0 + ((nColor*t)//h)%nColor # cycle colors
        ch = text[t%nText]  # Get char & Use xterm-256 color escs
        print("%*s\033[38;5;%sm%s\033[m\n" % (x, "", color, ch))
        t += 1
        sleep(0.1)   # original used bc shell outs to rate-limit

I don't know... I prefer unobfuscated text that you can immediately grok. The other day I saw this on a T-shirt:

> May the m×s/t² be with you

On one hand it's nice how it's clean and commented, but on the other hand some golfing could have made the encoded block a lot more reasonable to actually manually enter.

Ive been to 3 Uniqlos in my are and i havent been blessed with a bash shirt :(

Nice!

Might have to do something like that for a verse on the next Carolina Code Conference shirt. Been trying to figure out a good way to pull in cybersecurity.

Could have saved 50% with 'base64 -d | gzip -d'

The real threat model here isn't the base64 payload, it's Uniqlo turning a T-shirt into a QR code that requires a human OCR pipeline to redeem.

Well at least they're not instructing consumers to run curl | bash.

That's better than half the tech howtos out there.

Fascinating that we have base64 but not error correction for it!

what if it contained a zero day for tesseract and the script you thought you got is just a throwaway

Looks like it has a few shellcheck issues, and no set -euo pipefail? ;)

there's no newline between the shebang and the actual code

Cool! I bought one a few months ago as soon as I spotted it at a Uniqlo store, and later ordered a larger size online—I really love wearing them. But it never occurred to me to look into the story behind them.

After being primed by the article, I read the author's name as "Shirtliker"...

Thanks for the post! Love Easter Eggs like these!

Brilliant marketing when you can get people to pay to walk around advertising with your logo!!

Nice investigation, thx

Thanks for doing this, I almost bought it just to decode it, lol.

TIL Consolas is a Windows font

Base64 without error correction turns the t-shirt itself into a lossy transport layer, so the OCR/transcription step becomes the actual challenge.

Feels very reminiscent of the style of old DeCSS tshirts

https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt...

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

P ./cool.sh: line 31: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 34: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 37: bc: command not found E ./cool.sh: line 31: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 34: bc: command not found ./cool.sh: line 37: bc: command not found

Very wow. Shame they assumed everyone has "bc"...

Why does the shirt have an obfuscated bash script on the back?

> I ran OCR in a few ways: First, using the built-in OCR of the circle-to-search feature on Android, which is often very good. Second, by using Tesseract with a few options and tweaks. And third by running it through Claude. After diffing the three to look for mismatches and getting Claude to output a table of locations for quick scanning, it became trivial but time-consuimg to tidy up the remainder

I bet 10$ I'd spend less time typing it from the t-shirt. And I wouldn't boil two kettles of water in the process.

But hey, AI makes you 10x more productive, I suppose