pictures

LionsGate: Piracy a major deciding factor for Blu-ray support

At CES on Monday, I was invited over to the Blu-ray booth to speak with top executives at the major Hollywood studios supporting Blu-ray. And while I didn't have the chance to speak with every studio, I did get to speak with the president and chief operating officer at LionsGate, Steve Beeks.

And while Beeks seemed like he had solid command over the finer points of the movie industry, I was interested to see why his studio chose Blu-ray over the alternative.

Expecting the canned answer like, "Well, we thought it was the superior format and I'm happy to say that we were right," you could imagine my surprise when the very first reason he gave was Blu-ray's piracy controls.

For those of you who don't know, Blu-ray's piracy controls--largely based on AACS, BD+, and BD-ROM Mark--are easily the most stringent format to date and have only partially been circumvented to this point.

Regardless, I was utterly appalled at the thought that with all of its benefits--high-capacity, interesting new features to employ while playing movies, major industry backing--Beeks chose piracy as the first talking point.

Of course, I had to find out more.… Read more

Killer Download: Top free image editors

Once I've taken care of installing security software on a new a PC, one of the first programs I end up downloading is an image editor. Whether I'm using it to make a quick edit to a screenshot, convert a digital photo to a more Web-friendly image format, or even something as mundane as cropping an image for a desktop background, an easy-to-use image editor is a must have. Those of you with recently acquired computers probably have a lot of holiday photos you've resolved to go through, so this little collection will definitely come in handy.… Read more

Digital gifts that keep on giving

Care should be taken when plugging holiday gift gadgets into your personal computer and laptop, said security researchers at Sans.org, Microsoft, and Kaspersky in recent blog posts. Reports of strange files being found on USB storage devices increased over the holiday season. Reporting Monday on the SANS' Internet Storm Center blog, director Marcus Sachs said, "In years past this would have been limited to iPods and USB memory sticks, but now it includes digital photo frames, GPS devices, external hard drives, and of course digital cameras."

The unofficial Sans.org investigation started on Christmas after researcher David … Read more

Power Downloader makes a comic out of real-life images

Recently Power Downloader received an e-mail from Kitty Kilobyte who was away at school. Apparently Kitty had amassed a huge amount of digital photos by taking her camera with her wherever she went. She had pictures from birthday parties, school events, and concerts she had attended, and also simple shots of friends at school and other scenery in her life. She had thought about putting them into albums or posting them online, but wondered if Power knew of something new and exciting she could do with her photographs.… Read more

GoSee4Me turns amateur photographers into Internet spies

GoSee4Me is a new service hoping to help give people with cameras and too much time on their hands a spare buck or two. Similar to some of the question and answer services out there, GoSee4Me is a network for people to get pictures from all over the globe by utilizing a pay-per-picture system generated by users who can "claim" shots like they would an assignment. This isn't aimed at the folks who would be content just looking for something by tags or description in Flickr, Zooomr, or other photo-sharing sites. Instead it's aimed at unearthing … Read more

Organize your pictures with Geophoto for Mac

Almost everyone takes pictures when traveling so they have something to bring back the memories once their vacation is over. A few years ago I went to several countries across Europe and took a ton of pictures with my digital camera. When I flip through the albums now, in some cases I'll forget where some of the more nondescript or interior pictures were taken. Today I found a program for Mac which not only solves that problem, but makes it more fun to view pictures from around the world.… Read more

Monitor the wine with the family photos

Anyone who's addicted to gadget catalogs can tell you that two of the most common items are digital photo frames and personal weather stations, including some built into the tips of umbrellas. So it's small wonder that the two functions would be combined in a single device.

Its name? The "Digital Picture Frame With Weather Station," what else? The combo appliance has a 7-inch color LCD, radio-controlled clocks and all the data you can shake a meteorologist's stick at, including the phases of the sun and the moon. As for its multi-tasking abilities, its remote … Read more

PicUrls does social news in pictures

While there's a giant crowd of people waiting for Digg to unveil its pictures section, there are already several services available for browsing popular news by pictures, including Google News and AOL's Mgnet (coverage). There's also a smaller, more independent group of sites that have been created by fans of some of these sites who have created their own visual solutions. One of them--Reddit Media--has increasingly become so popular it's led to Digpicz (Digg in pictures), and now PicUrls--which is a play on words, and similarity to the popular aggregator PopUrls.

The site … Read more

Ahhh! Mutating faces!

Big on Digg yesterday was a face mutations site called Mutating Pictures that would let you rate how much a randomly thrown together pile of geometric objects looked like a human face. Voting up a picture would in turn create more "offspring," or similar variants of the chosen picture, while simultaneously "killing off" the lower ranked faces. The result is a user-controlled evolutionary system at a very basic level.

Today, almost ironically, we've got a mutation of the site called Face Maker that attempts to solve the same problem using an either-or model. Instead of … Read more

Picnik launching premium service tomorrow

Picnik is launching a new premium subscription service tomorrow morning. $24.95 gets you a year of access to a slew of advanced effects and fonts. Many of the premium effects have been available during the service's beta testing period, but there are some new ones that do a pretty incredible job of taking a drab photo and making it look special.

The biggest thing premium users will notice is over a dozen effects that aren't available in the standard version, and seven brand-new ones. According to CEO Jonathan Sposato, the No. 1 request from users is more … Read more