Decoding the Obfuscated Bash Script Hidden on a Uniqlo T-Shirt
Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt
I discovered a Uniqlo t-shirt featuring an obfuscated Bash script from Akamai, part of their Peace for All campaign. After painstakingly transcribing the base64 code via OCR, I decoded it to reveal a colorful terminal animation. This clever Easter egg celebrates Linux as the language of the internet, blending retail fashion with open-source culture in a surprising way.
I told my wife 'that's basically how people ship viruses' and bought it.
- estebarb
"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.
- olooney
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you might also like Martin Kleppe's work, such as the Quine Clock:
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:
- wbh1
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
- raphlinus
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.
- Tiberium
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 :)
- world2vec
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.
- haileys
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
- chrysoprace
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