How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop

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Basically, as far as we can surmise, 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. For what it’s worth, Hansen claims that the light in the alley was natural — and to be fair, sometimes magical lighting does occur. I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake — there’s just something about the lighting that sets off a warning alarm in your brain. As for why World Press Photo didn’t forensically analyze the photo using freely available, advanced, accurate analysis tools such as FourMatch or FotoForensics… who knows.

via ExtremeTech » How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop.

Open Compute to open source high-end network switches

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That said, many high-speed switches today use BSD Unix as their basis. While many say that the OCP is starting with a “clean sheet of paper”, the ultimate goal of the project seems to be to give datacenter administrators a “bare metal network switch”. I think it’s likely that BSD will lie at its heart. After all, why reinvent the wheel?

via Open Compute to open source high-end network switches | ZDNet.

Vyatta.org Community

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The free community Vyatta Core software(VC) is an award-winning open source network operating system providing advanced IPv4 and IPv6 routing, stateful firewalling, IPSec and SSL OpenVPN, and more. When you add Vyatta to a standard x86 hardware system, you can create an enterprise grade network appliance that easily scales from DSL to 10Gbps. Vyatta is also optimized to run in VMware, Citrix XenServer, Xen, KVM, and Hyper V, providing networking and security services to virtual machines and cloud computing environments. Vyatta has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times, has a community of hundreds of thousands of registered users and counts dozens of fortune 500 businesses among its commercial customers.

via Welcome to Vyatta.org | Vyatta.org Community.

On this site, you’ll find all the downloads, tools, documentation, and community resources to help you get up and running with your own Vyatta-based system. Ask questions in the Forums. Propose new features and vote on existing proposals. Participate and have fun. We have been working together with our community for over five years to continue to enhance the world’s leading software-based network OS.

The British ‘Atlantis’ is mapped in detail

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The camera uses high frequency sound and acoustic lenses to refract sound waves and create film footage without light. The technology is usually reserved for creating a fly-by of sunken ships, but it has now picked up the wreckage of the former trading hub in astonishing detail. In addition, old naval navigation charts helped in the tracking and mapping of where the former coastline stood.

via The British ‘Atlantis’ is mapped in detail | Ars Technica.

Meanwhile in Brazil, the discovery of a large lump of granite rock 1,500km (932 miles) off the coast of Rio de Janeiro has led to claims that the real Atlantis has been discovered.

How to Retreive Expired Snapchat Photos

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Snapchat moves “upward of 150 million photos through the service on a daily basis.” Compared to Facebook’s Instagram, which moves 40 million photos a day, that is a lot of photos moved for such a new company. The app differs in the fact that images and videos are ephemeral rather than permanent, something that is attractive to teens and young adults.

via Snapchat – 4-30-13.

I suspected the ephemeral nature of Snapchat was a mirage but surprised at how simple they made it.  It is impossible to do what Snapchat claims because a simple screen grabbing app on the receiving end could also capture any photo or chat blurb before expiration.  I am surprised at how large Snapchat has become.  Here’s a pertinent blurb as to where the expired image files are stored.  The original article gets into more detail.

Each of the images within the received_image_snaps folder had a .nomedia extension appended to the end of the file name. For example, the name of the file figure 3 is “h1a81hurcs00h1365528700423.jpg.nomedia”. This was likely done to prevent the images stored within this directory from being placed in the gallery or from being scanned by the media store. AccessData’s Forensic Toolkit recognized the .nomedia extension that was appended to the end of the file name and ignored it, displaying the images.

Goldman Sachs employees concerned Bloomberg news reporters are using terminals to snoop

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Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but also how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

via EXCLUSIVE: Goldman Sachs employees concerned Bloomberg news reporters are using terminals to snoop – NYPOST.com.

I doubt this will end well for some people.

CLS Bank v. Alice Corp: Court Finds Many Software Patents Ineligible

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In a much awaited en banc decision, the Federal Circuit has affirmed the patent ineligibility of Alice Corp’s claims to a computerized method, a computer-readable medium containing computer instructions, and a computer system that implements those instructions.

via CLS Bank v. Alice Corp: Court Finds Many Software Patents Ineligible – Patent Law Blog (Patently-O).

Also from: Federal Circuit, en banc, rules in CLS Bank ~pj Updated

The Federal Circuit. OMG. We’ve worked hard for so many years to get to this point, I almost can’t believe it. And I suppose it’s possible it could be appealed, but this is proof of what I’ve always told you, that education is never a waste. Judge Rader is very upset, I gather. He has written a dissent. But he didn’t prevail. And I’m sure he gave it his best effort. OMG. This is a new day.

Original opinion here. (pdf)

Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says

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The space station uses chilled liquid ammonia to cool down the power systems on its eight giant solararray panels. A minor leak of this ammonia was first noticed in 2007, and NASA has been studying the issue ever since. In November 2012 two astronauts took a spacewalk to fix the problem, rewiring some coolant lines and installing a spare radiator due to fears the original radiator was damaged by a micrometeorite impact.

via Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says | Weather Underground.

Update: Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak

A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk, Cassidy and Marshburn removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby on the port-side truss, or backbone of the station. Mission Control ran the new pump while the spacewalkers watched for any ammonia snowflakes, but so far there have been no new signs of a leak. Long-term monitoring of the pump will be required to determine whether the pump replacement has fixed the leak.

Realtime GPU Audio

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While these techniques are widely used and understood, they work primarily with a model of the abstract sound produced by an instrument or object, not a model of the instrument or object itself. A more recent approach is physical modeling- based audio synthesis, where the audio waveforms are generated using detailed numerical simulation of physical objects or instruments.

via Realtime GPU Audio – ACM Queue.

There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao,1 uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found at http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/FDGPU). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs.