Trails

Some time ago, I purchased clones of the Stroboframe Quick Flip 350 and the Nikon Off-camera Shoe Cord SC-28 off eBay. I’ve put written review of both items at my DPanswers web site.

If you have questions or comments, please put them below this blog entry.

Just posted my initial observations after testing the Nissin Di866 flash: click here.

I just bought an infrared remote control unit to trigger my camera without touching the shutter button.

This particular unit is sold under a number of different brands, including Jianisi, Jue Ying and Phottix. Prices vary between vendors. I bought mine from Hong Kong vendor and paid USD 3.49, including postage. I ordered the one called “Jianisi”, but the unit I received was branded “Jue Ying”.

The unit is actually made to work with for different camera systems (Pentax, Nikon, Canon and Konica-Minolta), and it works as advertised for those I’ve tested it with. I’ve put up a full review on the DPanswers website.

Web browsers are finally starting to understand embedded ICC profiles inside images.

I’ve created a little webpage you can use to determine whether your particukar setup is capable of this. To try it out, click here.

You’ll notice that at the bottom of the page, there is a section with results for various OS and browser combinations. If you try this out with a new combination, feel free to report the result by sending me email, or to leave a reply in this blog.

(I changed the test on Aug. 28 to a simpler one. The comments below refer to the old version.)

This week it was widely reported in various media that the Spanish newspaper El Periódico “had found” conclusive evidence that Robert Capa’s famous photo from the Spanish civil war, Death of a loyalist militiaman was a fake.

While not mentioned in the article, the Spanish newspaper’s claim is based upon the work of professor José Manuel Susperregui, who teaches communications studies at País Vasco University in Spain, and an analysis that he published in his recent book Sombras de la Fotografía (Shadows of Photography). Professor Susperregui provides compelling evidence that Death of a loyalist militiaman was photographed in Llano de Banda, an area of countryside close to the small village of Espejo, and not in Cerro Muriano (45 km from Espejo), where Capa claims the photo was taken. Historians say there wasn’t a battle in Espejo on September 5, 1936, when the photograph was taken, so the death must have been faked.

We also know, due to an obituary uncovered by Alicante historian Miguel Pascual Mira, that the militiaman depicted in Capa’s photo is not Federico Borrell García as previously thought. Borell died in the Cerro Muriano battle on September 5, 1936. While he has been postively identified as Capa’s fallen militiaman by his brother’s widow and his niece, Borrell’s obituary, published in anarchist journal Ruta Confederal number 13 of October 23rd 1937 (one year and thirty eight days after the battle of Cerro Muriano) and written by a fellow militiaman and eyewitness to Borell’s death, describes Borell being shot while seeking cover behind a tree. There is no tree in Capa’s photograph.

Mira’s discovery has, as far as I know, not been widely reported. Susperregui’s findings was first reported on June 14th 2009 in the British newspaper The Guardian, but wasn’t widely disseminated before El Periódico picked up the story, on July 17th 2009.

However, while Susperregui may be right about the location where the photo is taken, he still may be wrong about the death being faked. While no actual battle took place in Espejo on that day, there may have been snipers in the area.

Capa’s main biographer, Richard Whelan, has struggled extensively with the photograph, and devotes 32 pages of his This Is War! Robert Capa at Work (IDC, Steidl, 2007) to a discussion of its authenticity. Whelan’s account about how this photo came ito being, quoted below, may also explain why Capa lied about the location.

The image, known as Death of a Loyalist militiaman or simply The Falling Soldier, has become almost universally recognized as one of the greatest war photographs ever made. The photograph has also generated a great deal of controversy. In recent years, it has been alleged that Capa staged the scene, a charge that has forced me to undertake a fantastic amount of research over the course of two decades. I have wrestled with the dilemma of how to deal with a photograph that one believes to be genuine but that one cannot know with absolute certainty to be a truthful documentation.

What does one do with a photograph that is now often published with a caption mentioning the doubts that have been raised about its authenticity? Has the taint of suspicion rendered it permanently impotent? Will Capa’s photograph have to be relegated to the dustbin of history? As I will attempt to demonstrate here, the truth concerning The Falling Soldier is neither black nor white. It is neither a photograph of a man pretending to have been shot, nor an image made during what we would normally consider the heat of battle. (Whelan 2007, p. 54)

[…]

The disturbing fact of the soldier’s flat-footedness, along with the equally disturbing inference that the man was carrying his rifle in a way suggesting that he did not expect to use it soon, led me to reconsider the story that Hansel Mieth, who had become a Life staff photographer in the late 1930s, wrote to me in a letter dated March 19, 1982.

She said that Capa, very upset, had once told her about the situation in which he had made his famous photograph.

“They were fooling around,” [Capa] said. “We all were fooling around. We felt good. There was no shooting. They came running down the slope. I ran too and knipsed.”
“Did you tell them to stage an attack?” asked Mieth.
“Hell no. We were all happy. A little crazy, maybe.”
“And then?”
“Then, suddenly it was the real thing. I didn’t hear the firing – not at first.”
“Where were you?”
“Out there, a little ahead and to the side of them.”

Beyond that, Capa told Mieth only that the episode haunted him badly. We do not know the nature of Capa’s guilt. Did he initiate the “knipsing” and feel guilty about its outcome? Or perhaps the soldiers initiated the “knipsing” because they wanted to be photographed. The “knipsing” seems to have ended when the soldier stood up to have Capa make a portrait of him. But did Capa ask the soldier to stand up for his portrait, or did the soldier himself suggest making the portrait? Whatever the case, Capa implied to Mieth that he felt at least partially responsible for the man’s death. (ibid., pp. 72-74)

[…]

By Capa’s own testimony to Hansel Mieth, his Cerro Muriano photographs leading up to The Falling Soldier depict “fooling around” rather than posing or actual fighting. But, according to that same testimony, the moment captured in The Falling Soldier was deadly earnest. Federico Borrell García stood up for what was intended to be a heroic portrait but which became, completely unexpectedly, a picture of a man who has just been mortally wounded. (ibid., p. 86)

Whelan’s account, where a staged photo opportunity turns deadly due to a sniper’s bullet, may explain why Capa did not reveal the true location of the shot. If he didn’t want his own involvment in the events that lead to the militiaman’s death to become publicly known, he would be well served by locating the photo to a place where the real battle took place on that day, rather than in a location where he and the loyalist militia were just “fooling around”.

However, the new evidence uncovered by Mira and Susperregui can not be ignored. Both findings strengthen the case of those that believe that this particular photograpic icon is indeed a fake.

For more documentation about this photo, see the websites of Italian photo historian Luca Pagni and Spanish blogger José Manuel Serrano Esparza.

See also my 2006 entry about Photography and deception.

According to a press release on the home page of Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF), the company has acquired The Pirate Bay website and brand for SEK 60 million (around US$ 7.8 million) of which half is to be paid in cash and the other half in newly issued shares.

GGF CEO Hans Pandeya says that his plan is to turn the site into legitimate business: “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”

On the face of it The Pirate Bay has just executed phase three of the standard Web 2.0 business plan. 1) Set up a website to give someone else’s stuff away for free. 2) Build a huge user base. 3) Sell out.

Following the announcement, angry users are migrating to other torrent tracker sites in droves, expressing their outrage about the sale on their way out.

Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (BrokeP) seems to have been taken by surprise by the hostile reactions. He tweets: “We’ve been fighting for five years. Where’s the thanks?”

I’m not surprised by the fact that the Pirate Bay’s founders have become tired, and want to move on. The court decision in April 2009 that ordered Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and three other founders to pay SEK 30 million in damages and spend one year in prison is no fun. And still running a site that assists users in illegal file sharing will presumably not help the four when they face the court in the upcoming appeal case.

So the sell-out may simply a be ruse by the four to save face. Given their flamboyant rhetoric about copyright piracy is all about freedom of speech and openness of the Internet, they just couldn’t bend over and shut down the site. So instead, they sell it, insisting that this is not a sell-out and that the new owner will keep the site running just like it was before. Yeah, right! And if the new owner doesn’t do that? Well then it obviously is the new owners that have reneged on the sacred principles of pirathood, not Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and his colleagues.

The announcement on the Pirate Bay blog also claims that: “The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openness of the nets.” A very noble move, but not a very believable one, given that the Pirate Bay is notorious for offering absolutely no transparency into the site’s financial transactions, and bearing in mind that an offshore foundation with some suitable vague worthy cause is a nice place to hide money from lawyers, bailiffs and taxmen.

OK. The deal makes perfect sense for the Pirate Bay owners. They can bow out gracefully, save face, and even make a profit.

But what about the other party in this deal. What does GGF get for its SEK 60 million?

The Pirate Bay website is a service running on the Internet hosting BitTorrent trackers. It consists of some web servers that are supposed to be hidden in the Sinai desert. It also has some brand recognition in the community of file sharers. That’s it.

The Pirate Bay crew has somehow succeeded in persuading its fanbase and part of the media that hosting a torrent tracker on a website is innovation. But as far as I know, the Pirate Bay crew has never developed a new technology, a new business model, a new media delivery model, or anything else that may create or sustain a legitimate business. (Publicly funded research created the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee created the web, and Bram Cohen wrote BitTorrent).

The Pirate Bay’s value proposition is very simple. It provides its users with access to all the world’s most sought after digital content for free. If you take away “content”, or you take away “free”, what remains is a weird brand name (for a non-piracy outfit) and some web servers. In my humble opinion, SEK 60 million is a lot to pay for this.

To complicate matters, the Pirate Bay begot a political movement (sort of), grounded in the site’s founders’ blatant disregard for copyright law and willingness to make available to the general public free and unrestricted access to other people’s creative works.

I still have to figure out pirate politics (and I shall return to that subject in a later posting). The interesting bit in the context of the Pirate Bay – GGF-deal is that the Pirate Bay’s use of political rhetoric to cover for its lack of a real business model may prove to be lethal to the site’s new owners. Pirate politics seems to be a particular brand of technological determinism that says that if technology makes “something” convenient and easy, that “something” is also “right”. (And that anyone resisting such convenience and ease is a Luddite standing in the way of the future.)

GGF CEO Hans Pandeyas planned business model for the “new” Pirate Bay is appearently to create a marketplace for bandwidth. It will be interesting to see whether he can persuade ISPs to buy back their own bandwidth from file sharers. And how does this buying and selling of bandwidth relate to the the concept of network neutrality? What is clear is that the simple and completely unrestricted free-for-all distribution model of the “original” Pirate Bay cannot remain in place under the new owners. Whatever emerges from the transition will be restricted to whatever legal arrangements GGF is able to make with the content industry. To make matters worse, the “new” Pirate Bay will have to compete with Spotify, iTunes, Napster, MagnaTune and other legitimate marketeers of digital content, as well as a host of other outfits of more dubious legality (e.g. MiniNova, Demonoid, ISOhunt, 1337x).

I wish Hans Pandeya the best of luck with his purchase and with the project that will make the Pirate Bay a legitimate venture. I honestly don’t understand why he is paying SEK 60 million for this franchise, or how he plans to fund the purchase. But that, strictly speaking, is none of my business.

(Thanks to Gunnar Roland Tjomlid for corrections to my sometimes awful grammar.)

Is WolframAlpha the next insanely great thing? The slayer of Wikipedia? The usurper of Google?

According to its creator, Stephen Wolfram, WolframAlpha is a «true computational knowledge engine». This feature apperently important enough to be part of the masthead of the service.

As far as I can tell, it is a new and quite ingenious piece of software where unstructured (and not always correct) data from miscellanious sources (e.g. the CIA World Factbook, Wikipedia and a listing of very obscure languages) are assembled into some sort of metadata-enriched structure. In response to queries that the user enters via a standard search box, the «computational knowledge engine» will run a set of algorithms that produces «facts» in a nice tabular layout with graphs and maps. It does some things very well, such as math (of course, since it contains WolframMathematica), unit conversion, and embedded calculators (for a demo enter «bmi» and click «formula»).

However, it has some shortcomings. The first test I run of any search engine is to search for my own name. Both Google and Wikipedia knows about «Gisle», and will list a bunch of people with that name in response to this search. WolframAlpha thinks «gisle» is a misspelling for «giele», which it interpretes to mean «gyele», a language spoken in Cameroon.

Oh, well, I guess I’m not famous. After all, WolframAlpha knows that «Barack» is the first name of Barack Hussein Obama II. But unlike Google and Wikipedia, it doesn’t bother to inform you that that this person is the 44th president of the USA.

I find some consolation when I discover that «bing» fares no better. «Bing» is the name of a famous Norwegian author and law professor, as well as being a Microsoft owned search engine. However, according to WolframAlpha, «bing» has a single meaning. And, yes, it is a language (spoken by 1200 people in Papua New Guinea).

Stephen Wolfram has explained that «computational knowledge engine» means that WolframAlpha will compute its answers in the form of hard facts, thereby avoiding the bias of Wikipedia and other human-edited source of knowledge. It is when things boils down do numbers that WolframAlpha is supposed to shine.

So I tried to search for «Oslo», my home town. And behold, WolframAlpha understands that this is Oslo (Norway), and not Oslo (Florida) or Oslo (Minnesota). So far, so good. However, it lists its «city population» as exactly 811 688 people. (No indication of what date this number is valid for, the source, or what is the meaning of «city population».) The Norwegian census bureau lists the population of the muncipality of Oslo as 575 475 people as of January 1, 2009. So while the answer is a number all right, it is appearently not the right number (provided you trust Norwegian census figures – which I do).

One claim made about WolframAlpha is that it is supposed to understand natural language queries. But asking it about «Oslo, Minnesota» is not interpreted (as I would) to mean the small town named «Oslo» in Marshall County, Minnesota, United States. Instead, it tells you about «Oslo (Norway)» and «Minnesota (state)», and also the «fact» that the average elevation of Oslo is 4 meters. Don’t use this thing to settle pop quiz bets, folks.

Apart from coming up with some strange answers, WolframAlpha, when compared to Google or Wikipedia, seems to have a very small knowledge base to compute its «facts» from. If the Wolfram team doesn’t know it and hasn’t «curated» it, WolframAlpha won’t find it. Compare this with a web search engine (Google) or a crowdsourced resource (Wikipedia). Both taps into the vast wealth of information that has been created by millions of people.

WolframAlpha is the opposite of a Web 2.0 site. It is a closed system that discards the wiki model for diversity of content and quality assurance. In its place, it puts the so-called «computational knowledge engine» and its team of anonymous «curators», and the results is appearently lacking, not only in coverage, but surprisingly, also in precision.

However, there is at least some Eliza-like fun stuff buried inside WolframAlpha. But I doubt that I will use it for much more than doing unit conversions and the occational bit of nerd humour.

After joining yet another social network (Origo – for those who care), and sending out the usual invites to friends and acquaintances to link up, I received an interesting return message from one of them (a good friend btw.) She jokingly inquired whether I, in the description that Origo encourages us users to tag our acquaintances with, planned to describe her as a “former colleague”, a “friend”, a “good friend”, or a “dear friend”.

This made me pause to think. Is it really wise to publish descriptions of the type of relationships one has to other people? What if those that I simply tag as “friend” start to wonder why they don’t merit the “good friend” rating? Will other people assume that these people are bad friends? And what if I at one point change my mind about a particular relationship. Such things happen, for various reasons, but do I really want such things to be notarized?

The more I think about this, the more I become convinced that these types of declarations of relationship have no place in a public arena. They should be constrained to the private domain, such as late night confidences and personal letters. Silly me, starting to use such tags in the first place!

So – my friends, good friends and dear friends, I’ll soon downgrade you all to “acquaintances” as far as our publicized relationships are concerned. Now you know why this happened. Be assured that I still love you all, just as much as before.

Websciety is a so-called portmanteau word merging the two words web and society. It seems to have been coined for the 2009 CeBIT, but maybe it should enter the general language to denote the functions and features that makes our lives digital?

Key enabling technologies are mobile Internet, wikis, online communities, virtual and enhanced reality, blogs, microblogs and other interactive Internet services, and concepts such as Web 2.0, knowledge management, and e-verything (e-Commerce, e-Learning, e-Government, e-Medicine). This makes it possible to access data and use software from any number of devices via the Internet, including mobile devices while on the go.

This also leads to new consumer realities. For example: Network attached storage, cloud computing and streaming servers now give us access to our own and others’ photos, music, movies and documents anywhere we like in our networked homes and on mobile devices while on the go. Almost all consumer electronics are becoming web-aware: cameras, phones, TV sets, music systems, netbooks or game consoles. By means of inexpensive single-chip mini-webservers, even inexpensive devices are getting networked.

In the workplace, similar technologies allows companies to create flexible interactive work groups and value networks, bringing in-house and field staff. partners and customers closer together for increased flexibility, cost efficiency and scalability.

On Monday, February 23rd, from 17:00 to 20:00, Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, gave a talk in Storsalen, Chateau Neuf (Slemdalsveien 15) in Oslo. The talk was sponsored by the University of Oslo, and the topic was: “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks – Free software and beyond”.

Here is a summary:

Copyright, developed in the age of the printing press, was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright–to promote progress, for the benefit of the public – then we must make changes in the other direction.

NUUG taped the event, and has made video of Stallman’s talk available.

My photos from the evening are on Flickr.