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A crack in the dent..A weekly mash up

Photo Sharing could make you sick: Read today this article about spammers using photo file sharing site as a new tool to get their annoying messages across:

Dmitri Alperovitch, principal research scientist at Secure Computing, said that instead of embedding image spam inside of e-mail messages, cybercriminals are starting to embed only a link to a photo or image they’ve put up on a photo-sharing site. Alperovitch said in an interview that this makes it a lot easier and more cost effective for the spammers, who no longer have to embed a bandwidth-sucking image in every message spammed out.

There is a mention of hackers using the same system but no explanation on how it would work. There has been attempts to embed viruses in meta data fields before and I am sure there will be more. After all, what looks more innocent than a .jpg attachment. I would imagine that the big file sharing site like Flickr and other Photobucket are monitoring the files uploaded to their servers. And I would expect they also monitor their site for spamming activities, but nevertheless, it is an interesting phenomena with a lot of ramifications.

Read the article at Information Week

Stupid but fun: The ArchCam. In a nutshell, you call a camera situated near an arch who takes a picture of you on your phone and uploads it to a website. No practical applications besides maybe amusement parks or other very “touristic-ly” challenged area. See for yourself at ArchCam.

Serious Help: Totally unknown in the USA but apparently popular in Europe, PhotoRetouch Digicam. A lazy photographer’s dream. For those of us tired of bloated Photoshop and its useless endless possibilities. I have yet to meet someone who actually uses all of the features of Photoshop. In the fast approaching age of artificial intelligence, the software should help you create a better image, not the opposite. I need help from my software, not more complications.This is my second favorite photo editing tool after ASP website Picknik.com.

Digital Cameras: I read a few really good articles this week about the saturation and maturity of the digicam market. For those who don’t know, digicams are digital point and shoot. Apparently, what the camera companies have been doing for the last years has been throwing as many models as possible on the market as quickly as possible for 2 purposes. Be on the market before the competition and create brand awareness, recognition and fidelity. Now that the market is saturated, Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony and others are finally ready to come out with the real cameras at a much slower pace. Sounds, or rather, looks very much like what the photo licensing business is going through right now.

I invented it : If I read one more blog or article about someone claiming that they invented or discovered microstock 10, 20 or 30 years ago, I will file an official complaint. Everyone, if you believe them, invented microstock back in the 1920’s but for some reason, were not very successful at it. I didn’t not invent microstock, nor did I ever had the idea for it. Now that it is here, I am very glad it is. I just wish more disruptive business models would appear in our industry at a faster pace.

No sense: Better than a James Bond story, this revealing article about US WEEKLY magazine practices. It involves celebrities, vast amounts of money, the FBI, spying, computer hacking and shady characters with unknown motives. According to them, USweekly has a “pricing email”? I worked for many many years with UsWeeekly and sold them a lot of images and never, never did we ever use an e mail. It was all done by phone. And if we did use email, it was send to the photo editors personal emails, not to an all purpose “pricing email”. You can follow the adventures of super spy in photo land at Jossip.com

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