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Comment Re:Reality (Score 3, Informative) 964

by Star_Gazer (#29197663) Attached to: Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One

I'll retract Che, as I couldn't find an example, but for the rest:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

I don't want to google more, but I remember seeing many more examples over the years.

You don't need to be a head of state to have photos edited, btw. It just need some devoted followers in the press or something like that.

Comment Re:Reality (Score 3, Insightful) 964

by Star_Gazer (#29196933) Attached to: Microsoft Poland Photoshops Black Guy To White One

That has nothing to do with the digital world, it just got easier. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Che and Castro all had former "friends" who happened to fall out of grace removed from pictures in their times. But of course this is going back much more, way before the availability of photography. Media was never and will never be reliable in general.

And I would argue that using raw data to is the only reliable way to inform yourself, anything that has been selected, annotated or edited is the problem, bringing over a certain point of view which is not necessarily neutral. Of course, this will seldom be possible because you dont' have access to that raw data.
Music

While My Guitar Gently Beeps 140

Posted by Soulskill from the happiness-is-a-warm-axe dept.
theodp writes "As the world prepares to meet the Beatles all over again on 9-9-9, the NY Times Magazine takes a look at the making of The Beatles: Rock Band, and asks a Fab Four tribute band to take the game for a test drive. (Not surprisingly, they fare well.) 'As huge as Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been over the past few years,' says Harmonix Music Systems co-founder Alex Rigopulos, 'I still think we're on the shy side of the chasm because the Beatles have a reach and power that transcends any other band.' The Beatles: Rock Band follows the group's career from Liverpool to the concert on the roof of Apple Corps in London in 1969 (trailer). The first half of the game recreates famous live performances; the second half weaves psychedelic dreamscapes around animations of the Beatles recording in Studio Two. 45 songs deemed the most fun to play, rather than the band's most iconic numbers, come with the game."
PC Games (Games)

Battle For Wesnoth Version 1.6 Released 90

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
bomanbot writes "The team for the great turn-based, open-source strategy game Battle for Wesnoth has just released the new stable version 1.6 of their popular title. Some of the new version's highlights include a new campaign, new multiplayer scenarios, improved graphics and user interface, and new background music. The full release notes have been posted, and the source code and binary downloads for many different platforms including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X are available as well."
Power

"Spin Battery" Effect Discovered 234

Posted by kdawson from the usual-caveats-apply dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, in Japan, have discovered a spin battery effect: the ability to store energy into the magnetic spin of a material and to later extract that energy as electricity, without a chemical reaction. The researchers have built an actual device to demonstrate the effect that has a diameter about that of a human hair. This is a potentially game-changing discovery that could affect battery and other technologies. Quoting: Although the actual device... cannot even light up an LED..., the energy that might be stored in this way could potentially run a car for miles. The possibilities are endless, Barnes said.'"

Comment Re:Old News (Score 1) 693

by Star_Gazer (#26435695) Attached to: iTunes DRM-Free Files Contain Personal Info

But do you honestly think that Apple is encoding that specific information into each track sold through the iTunes store, making essentially every single track sold unique? Do you realize how much more expensive it would be to "imprint" that information into the audio?

Why, it's easy - instead of watermarking a DRM'ed m4p with the account information, which they are doing since the 1st day of iTMS, they add the same information to the unproteced m4a. I am pretty much sure it's just one call to a specific library function in the store code, called just before uploading the file to the user.

And for putting it onto the CD: I guess it might be possible to add coded informations to the CDA that are inaudible as essentially MP3/AAC works by cutting stuff from the audio stream that you won't hear anyway, so why not reverse this. It's only a few bytes of information, easy to hide and would be done by the AAC decoder in an Apple product (iTunes). Also, audio steganography is not a new concept at all.

But in this case, it would be easy to detect: Find a friend who buys the same track, burn both tracks to CD's, rip them back as uncompressed CDA files and run a binary diff on them - any difference is an indication for this theory.

Nevertheless, I still don't care, as I won't do filesharing.
Spam

Spam Sites Infesting Google Search Results 207

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
The Google Watchdog blog is reporting that "Spam and virus sites infesting the Google SERPs in several categories" and speculates, ...Google's own index has been hacked. The circumvention of a guideline normally picked up by the Googlebot quickly is worrisome. The fact that none of the sites have real content and don't appear to even be hosted anywhere is even more scary. How did millions of sites get indexed if they don't exist?

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