Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt

"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.

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.

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 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 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

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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

It’s a movie plot.

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

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.

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

TIL Consolas is a Windows font

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.

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

Thanks for the post! Love Easter Eggs like these!

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

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

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

Nice investigation, thx

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

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

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...

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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?