[kbenson]

The crazy thing is that the fake tech is also often actually real, but real in the sense that there's a recent academic paper where in certain specific conditions they were able to do what is being asked ask by using lots of math, domain knowledge, and custom programming, at a total cost of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars when it's all done.

Does that help you in any way in a commercial setting? No, unless you are Google or Apple or the like and it's not a simple request but the basis of a new business division.

[Nadya]

Are you talking about the paper where they replicate keys from the roof of a building across the street when the keys were on the floor some several hundred feet away from a photograph? :)

[kbenson]

Not specifically, more just the occasional paper you see posted where they've found a way to recover missing data from surrounding context. I.e. something like reverse engineering redaction boxes from JPEGs by reversing a non-lossless algorithm twice, once to get the lossy image in raw form with redactoin boxes, and at that point again to determine what was likely under those boxes from the surrounding lossy compression as it existed before.