Was Photo of the Year Doctored?

‘A SWEDISH photographer has strongly defended himself against claims from a tech blogger that his gripping image, which won the prestigious 2013 World Press Photo of the Year, was a fake.

‘The story in extremetech.com said that Hansen “took a series of photos – and then later, realizing that his most dramatically situated photo was too dark and shadowy, decided to splice a bunch of images together and apply a liberal amount of dodging (brightening) to the shadowy regions”.

‘But Hansen said he had done nothing of the sort. Here’s what he told us:…’
Read more

I Don’t Want Your F**&^%$# App
Terence Eden rants that some websites coerce you into downloading apps and I agree. But he was wrong to say that TheFreeDictionary is such a one. You can add TheFreeDictionary in your search engines and that’s not downloading. Read more of Eden’s rant here:

The parallel time zone and depression
The internal clock of the human brain

‘People with severe depression have a disrupted “biological clock” that makes it seem as if they are living in a different time zone to the rest of the healthy population living alongside them, a study has found.

‘It is the first time that depression has been linked unequivocally to the internal circadian clock of the human brain, which regulates the body’s day-and-night cycle over a 24 hour period, scientists said.

‘The researchers found that they could estimate a healthy person’s time of death to within a few hours by analysing the activity levels of a set of genes – whether they are switched on ‘high’ or ‘low’ – within certain regions of the deceased brain…’
read more

The WebP Image Format Gets Mega-support
Facebook Joins Google in Push for WebP Image Format, Asks Firefox to Build in Support
howtogeek

Fix Write Protection Errors On a USB Stick
‘You’ve got your trusty USB flash drive plugged into your computer, and you go to copy some files to it. Then you get this – “The disk is write protected. Remove the write protection or use another disk.” Then you say, “Whaaaaaa….?!?!” How did this happen? This is your USB stick, you should be able to read, write and do whatever you want with it! Deep breath and stay calm. It is just an error message…’
the fix

Related articles

• Gaza burial? 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was ‘enhanced’ (israelmatzav.blogspot.com)

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The Art of Mass Murder

990913-N-1350W-004 (Photo credit: Marion Doss)

‘Once that you decided on a killing, first you make a stone of your heart.
And if you find that your hands are still willing,
Then you can turn murder into art.’ Murder by Numbers – Police

That is not a joke. The Rock band that composed that song in 1981 is really named Police. The combination of the title and the band name seems prophetic isn’t it? The political songs of Police in the album Synchronicity were amazingly intellectual yet amusing. Gordon Matthew Sumner was the band leader and main songwriter. When the band broke up, he went solo and became more popular as Sting — he successfully shifted to Rock-Jazz.

Although Sting doesn’t belong to any political group, he’s a member of Amnesty International and an environmental activist who was a founding member of The Rainforest Foundation. I sent him a few questions and if ever I get a reply, I will provide the update.

If you want to follow Sting, his website is Sting.com.

Bloody Mother’s Day
Multiple Gunmen Open Fire During New Orleans’ Mother’s Day Parade, At Least 12 Injured
link

World War III Conspiracy
‘Planned and executed by shadowy multi-generational fascists bent on world domination and genocidal depopulation, the wars surrounding Israel and Nuclear Armageddon are being scripted to usher in a totalitarian one world government for the Western and European oligarchy, and elite bankster class…’
The film

US Busted Blowing Up WTC on 911
’911 was a public snuff film used to shock the public and enact the end of the Bill of Rights & invasion of oil bearing countries, & make money for private companies like Halliburton, (stock from 10 to 50 a share)!
‘By destroying the WTC, they were able to cover up theft of gold bullion & destroy illegal financial transaction records performed just prior to the attacks
‘Silverstein spends 140 million to make 7 billion almost over night; Silverstein said it was demolished by explosives, (pull it)…’
video

FBI defends not sharing terror warnings with Boston
‘The FBI said Boston police could have read the information about Tsarnaev as easily as any other Joint Terrorism Task Force member, noting the force “specifically had representatives assigned to the JTTF squad that conducted the 2011 assessment of deceased terrorism suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”
‘The FBI statement noted the Boston task force had conducted some 1,000 assessments in 2011, a workload that made it unlikely each assessment could get close attention from every task force member.
‘It also noted Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived in Cambridge, not Boston…’
Read more

My Phantom Followers – Who Are These People?

Reblogged from Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts:

• 

There are any number of ways to measure success for those of us who write for the Internet. The number of daily readers seems to be the key criteria most often used as a yardstick.   *

One would expect, that the addition of a substantial number of “followers” (the number of readers following blog posts and post comments), should impact a site’s number of daily reads/visits – in a positive way.

Read more… 482 more words

This is happening with my stats too

Spiritual Advice on Counterhacking

Whosoever shall hack thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also
Why hacking back is not wise

‘While cybersecurity is an integral part of CloudFlare’s business, Prince cautions that any interaction with attackers carries risk. “Some people out there are real criminals. They have a way of fighting back,” he says.

‘Prince cites the example of Blue Security as a cautionary tale. This company drew raves—as well as criticism—for creating a way to spam back at spammers, clogging their systems and preventing them from sending out more spam. But the spammers fought back, unleashing attacks on Blue Security that caused collateral damage on the Internet. The company eventually closed down operations. “You can easily get in over your head,” says Prince…’
pcworld

Draft of new book leaked online
I think this is a great publicity stunt idea — if your manuscript is very long

‘Candace Bushnell, the author famous for “Sex and the City”, has fallen victim to a hacker who not only broke into her Twitter account, but also posted extracts of her as-yet-unfinished next book online.Although the creator of Carrie Bradshaw seems to have expelled the hacker from her Twitter account, and deleted the offending tweets, an early draft version of what seem to be the first 50 pages of Bushnell’s book – currently entitled “Killing Monica” – are available online for anyone to download and read to their heart’s content…’
sophos

Turn your Smartphone into a Laptop
We at Livi Design have seen awesome accessories for a lot of phones, but no Smartphone manufacturer has had the courage to make an accessory that doesn’t lock it’s customers into buying their specific products forever for support and additional income.

The Casetop by Livi Design is an innovative evolution of the laptop but features some very exciting new ideas!

Any Android*, iPhone, or Blackberry 10 becomes a laptop with 3x the battery life & when you run out, you have a full phone!

- Click here for specific examples of different uses and walk-throughs -
livi-design

No Facebook privacy for cheaters (or anyone else)
‘Ever hear of a Facebook (FB) app called Bang With Friends? It’s supposed to be a “simple, fun way” to find which of your Facebook friends are open to a dalliance.

‘Some may find it simple and fun, but private? Not at all — because of Facebook. A simple search can reveal which of a person’s Facebook friends use the app. But the issue is much bigger than this one service. Facebook’s long history of privacy challenges hasn’t resulted in a more airtight system. In fact, the company’s need to significantly increase revenue has pushed it in exactly the opposite direction, often without the knowledge of the users…’
cbsnews

My Worst Blunder at WordPress Editing

Blog of the day once again (Photo credit: the Italian voice)

If you are writing a new WP post, don’t use your browser return tab then click on ‘add new post’. I did that and previous posts were replaced by the new posts — the previous posts were deleted! And the funny thing was that I didn’t notice at once because I really don’t read my own blogs — I just scan them. I only noticed my blunder when I noticed that 2 posts were missing. Yes, I committed the blunder twice! What I did to restore the deleted posts:

I went to my WP mail notifications and opened ‘post changed’
This is the important part: I clicked the WP button ‘add new post’ then pasted and copied the deleted one. I saved it as a draft. I needed to do that to get the right publishing date sequences
I restored the one with the ‘restore’ option then repeated the step above

That was a bit easy. The hard part was creating tags and categories again (still have to do that)!

Online Things that Will Never Die
If you surf the social media web a lot, chances are you will stumble upon a lot of pieces about this app and that network or site dying. And most of those are plain dumb it’s sickening. The things I’m convinced will never die:

eMail
The online business world will simply not exist without emailing. Ever notice that the first thing a website asks for your registration is your email address? Digital business uses mail subscriptions and mail newsletters. Replace mail deliveries with RSS feeds? Try that and see how very much more time you will be wasting.

Blogging
Ahh… The most targeted of all. Most probably because it’s the tool most whistleblowers use. Corruption is all around us and our corrupt system don’t like being exposed. Even if the New World Order succeeds in shutting down all blogging platforms, it will have to kill all…

Social Networks
Because bloggers could also use them as alternative. And if or when that happens, you can be sure it’s the endtimes of the world.

Digital Activists
It’s possible to terminate them all. But as long as there’s oppression, a fiercer breed of activists will surely rise like the Phoenix. Every cause will always have its effect.

Have something to add? Please tell and do.

Get Alerts of Account Hack Attempts

Computer Security (Photo credit: Don Hankins)

Fake Passwords Send Alerts When Hackers Try To Access Your Accounts
‘This particular idea stems from a common practice amongst companies of creating “honeypot” accounts. Fake user accounts which don’t belong to anyone, but when accessed send an alert the company, letting them know there is an attempted hack underway.

‘The new measure would mean each account has a file that stores multiple cryptographically hashed passwords. If a hacker managers to crack these hashes, they would still have no way of determining which password is the real one. When they try to enter one of the fake passwords, a “honeychecker” would alert administrators of the hack attempt…’
honeychecker

The difference Between Hacks and Tricks
The Biggest Hacks Of This Year Weren’t Hacks — They Were Tricks
This hack, technically, was a three-part phishing scam.

‘Yesterday, The Onion’s tech team penned a blog post explaining Monday’s social media hack in elaborate detail. It lays out in plain language exactly out how employees were duped by the Syrian Electronic Army — the hacktivist group that’s been terrorizing major media outlets for weeks now. BuzzFeed was targeted with an identical attack last week.

‘The takeaway: This was hardly a hack. This was a series of tricks — of small lies, fake links, and webpages, and simple human deception…’
buzzfeed

Get Emergency Power from a Phone Line
‘What do you do if the power is out and you need to charge your cell phone to make an emergency phone call? Don’t worry. There are plenty of potential power sources all around you. One of them is the phone line. In this instructable, I am going to show you how you can use the phone line to power your small electronic such as your phone or other USB devices in an emergency…’
instructions

Just another spy tool
Sound Camera shows you the source of noises

‘If you work with machinery, engines or appliances of any type, then you’ve likely experienced the frustration of hearing a troublesome noise coming from somewhere, but not being able to pinpoint where. If only you could just grab a camera, and take a picture that showed you the noise’s location. Well, soon you should be able to do so, as that’s just what the SeeSV-S205 sound camera does…’
gizmag

First Request for Link Removal in Plato on-line

Media Bias – Associated Press Favors John McCain? (Photo credit: DavidErickson)

Actually, that was a spoofing attempt at Plato on-line
My mistake was that I replied before probing my suspicions. And Mark Turner confirmed my suspicions by his comment:

Looks like you got the same automated email requesting you remove sketchy links from your blog. You can safely ignore it.
Read more at my blog: http://www.markturner.net/2013/05/07/dear-william-fat-chance/

Here is the spoof message:

Hello,

My name is Ryan, and I am writing to you today on behalf of my employer, AccreditedOnlineColleges.org. We’ve been keeping a close eye on the goings on of other websites since the advent of the new Webmaster Standards. We want to make sure we’re doing everything in our power to stay up to date and relevant. Looking around the web, as it were, we’re beginning to fear that, perhaps, we’re not doing everything correctly. We’ve studied the guidelines rather closely, and we do see where we might have missed the marks.

For instance, many of the links we provided as resources have over optimized anchor text. Some might argue that it doesn’t matter what term is used for our links, but we don’t want to be accused of selling links to anyone. So, in an effort to keep ahead of the line, I was hoping I could prevail upon you to remove the links found on pochp.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/freeware-users-more-demanding.

My request doesn’t reflect the quality of pochp.wordpress.com. We are the ones who made mistakes and practiced bad linking when we were new. That means that we are losing good links, but I am not saying that your site is bad or low quality.

Thank you so much in advance of this favor. Please email me if you have any questions, and if you can help.

Warm regards,
Ryan Greene
ryan.greene@accreditedonlinecolleges.org
————-

Noticed that my name wasn’t mentioned at salutation? That is the first sign of malicious emails. The great trick was all the links in the message were legit.

AP guidelines tell reporters to tweet with caution
‘The AP is fine-tuning its social media guidelines for reporters, specifically on how to exercise caution while tweeting. Given the confusion and misinformation that spread around the Boston Marathon bombing story, not to mention its recent Twitter hacking, the news service wants its reporters to exercise extreme caution, saying “Staffers are advised to avoid spreading unconfirmed rumors through tweets and posts.” More:

‘Today, we’re releasing the latest version of our social media guidelines for AP employees, and a key update is a new set of guidance on how (and whether) to use social networks to get information and amateur content from people who are in danger, or who have suffered a significant personal loss…’
niemanlab

Philographics and Social Revolution
Explaining Complicated Philosophies With Gorgeously Simple Postcards

‘Try to explain any philosophical “ism” to your friend or colleague. Unless you’re both scholars, you probably can’t do so easily. London-based graphic designer Genís Carreras wants to make it easier for us to talk philosophy, so he’s removing words all together and replacing them with pictures in his postcard and book project Philographics…’
see designs