We live in pretty interesting times . We’ve seen a lot of changes in the way society looks at certain things . Yesterday’s taboos are today’s accepted practices. This is especially true in North America. The racial equality is now higher than ever and the same applies to women in work places.

The IT sector had a major influence on many of these cultural shifts. Electronic storage and data extraction from huge depositories of information facilitated many tedious tasks. In the past you had to manually search for a paper “entry”. Now the desired information is 2 clicks away. Things like medical records, bills and other important documents are stored digitally which prevents data loss due to fires.

But this is where things get complicated. Hackers might attempt to break into these archives from the comfort of their own home. It makes our personal information vulnerable to rogue attacks. Because where there is a lock there will always be a key.

It’s scary, but it doesn’t mean we should revert back to stone age. There are many examples of how technology can help regular people access large databases. Let’s take number-private-search.com/516/504/ as an example.

This service allows you to get details about the person to whom a particular telephone number belongs. Potential benefits of this service are amazing. If a person is being bombarded with phone calls from a particular telemarketing company he can reverse lookup their number and send an official letter to their address. You can also discover who is that annoying individual who is placing silent phone calls.

Unfortunately this innocent service can be used in a bad way.

A sexual predator also knows how to use reverse lookups. An unsuspecting individual might share the phone number with a stranger who will use it for all the wrong reasons.

Sometimes there is a really thin line between danger and convenience. There are no easy answers when it comes to privacy.

Every single individual should be able to express his opinion. We as people should be the ones dictating what can and cannot be disclosed. Our expressions of freedom are like small grains which are easy to lose but hard to get back. Our children might one day find themselves in a complete privacy nightmare. If ever that level of privacy violation is reached it would be extremely hard to change anything. I think that every privacy bill should pass through the smallest levels of senate in order to satisfy people’s privacy needs.

Are you sick and bored with shooting (and viewing) the identical old photography, over and over again? You have heard rumors that “green screen” is the route to go, except you do not truly comprehend it or even know much about it? This is all it’s essential to understand to apply it as a photography background!

Firstly…What exactly is it?

You’ll hear the labels “green screen”, “blue screen”, and “chroma key” tossed around and employed to mean the same thing when discussing a photography background.

Chroma key simply could be defined as having a background which is one un-patterned, uniformly lit color. The green and blue are the most typical colors. In reality, you could potentially employ ANY color – but green and blue are best. I’ll make clear why that’s the case in a second.

Chroma key techniques can be utilized during both video and still photography. You photograph somebody in front of the green screen and then we later (or at the same time working with high end video cameras) you get rid of the solid color and supplant it using any type of backdrop you want!

It’s the way your local weatherman/woman does the weather report. They are in front of a green screen and the camera digitally strips it out and puts in your local weather map. They are watching themselves on the television monitor to determine where to point and so on. It’s confusing and more difficult than you may think to be a weather reporter!

Secondly…Why use blue or green?

Typically we tend to work with blue and green since they’re the farthest away from the colors present in skin tones. The technique was primarily accomplished by blue, however as the standard of cameras changes, green seems to work better. It really is less difficult to strip out of the background, thus most studios are switching to green. However it doesn’t do any harm to possess both of them.

Another advantageous point for green is that it generates less clothing conflicts.

Considering that color is automatically eliminated and substituted, if the subject has on a hue of that color (blue) in their apparel…it is replaced. You can time and again see shirts and ties that turn out to be humorous appearing holes in the subject – showing through to the replacement background.

It’s even happened with blue eyes!

Green tends to create not as much of a clothing conflict, it can be simpler for the cameras to work with and it’s simpler to light uniformly.

Smooth lighting is important since shadows falling on the background will show in the end result. This could destroy the realistic effect of the photography background. And, using irregular lights, you would create various shades of the color…a few of which may not get deleted properly.

The three chief kinds of green screen backgrounds are: fabric, paper and paint.

Paint is good when you’ve got a studio having a cove and you do all your photos there…it’s useless in case you ever need to go on location.

Paper comes in huge rolls, but is easily ripped and constantly needs replacing. This will get pricey in a hurry.

Cloth tends to endure longest and is transportable. And fabric is simple to wash (grimy green screen backgrounds do not work well).

Any fabric store can provide some fabric that could accomplish the job. Get some and do some experimenting with your photography background, any photo editing program is able to strip out the color. Experiment with it, you will like it!

Since we’re your go-to source for complaining about DRM (now on CNN!), I figure we should mention the latest development regarding EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Dice, the game’s developer’s, have removed SecuROM DRM from both the retail version of the game as well as the digitally distributed one (i.e. Steam). Why a Steam game even needs SecuROM in the first place (it’s merely a disc check, so…) is a question I cannot answer. It’s probably like a contractual thing or something.

This comes by way of the game’s latest patch, which went live for the retail version—the Steam version is still on the way.

Other things of note? Not really, just the average bug-fixes and UI fine tuning.

In other news, yes, Inter beat Chelsea! That made my day, for real.

What you’re looking at is an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller called “A Parallel Image.” Technically, it’s art, but it’s more of an interesting deconstruction of technology than anything else. Instead of transmitting a video signal digitally via HDMI or VGA, this contraption does it in analog: 2500 photoconductors in an array, individually wired to 2500 bulbs on the other side. The result is that anything shone on one side appears on the other by a simple and entirely physical process.

It’s ridiculously inefficient in one way, yet almost as elegant as possible in another. And as you can imagine, it’s not very high resolution. 2500=50 x 50, so it’s got about the same amount of pixels as an area the size of a quarter on whatever screen you’re reading this on. Not something I’d want to read blogs with, but it does transmit that projector image pretty well.

[via Hack a Day]

By David Ponce

Our old pal James Grahame from Retro Thing recently released three T-shirt designs. This is what he has to say about them:

After months of top secret R&D, we’re proud to unveil three limited edition Retro Thing shirt designs. They were created pixel-by-pixel on a curmudgeonly old Atari 130XE, ensuring maximum authenticity and the most convoluted workflow since the Apollo missions.

Each pixel tee is screen printed on a heavyweight 6.1oz Gildan Ultra Cotton shirt in Madison, Wisconsin by a genuine American named Rick. There’s no digitally printed tomfoolery here, nor are our shirts made by 3-week-old kittens slaving at gunpoint in North Korean sweatshops.

We’re big fans, so head over there before December 8th to order yours, for all of $14.

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