Family, Photography and other misc news
General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography
So the UK on line safety act has only been active a few months. Meant to close the door on unsuitable material but already one of the companies doing the age verification has been hacked.
As was warned now adults have had there details stollen and are now at risk of identify theft.
We are seeing vital health knowledge now blocked to minors who need it.
Its not looking good, but its looks like UK government are looking to expand and increase censorship online for the UK.
Today the UK’s new on line safety act came into force.
The aim they say is to protect children, which we can all agree with, but will it work and is it too draconian.
The act makes it illegal for content that could offend or cause distress, and also bans pornography for those under the age of eighteen. The issue with the act is that it does not define these terms. Pornography is something that could turn on a viewer.
These bans will be controlled through age verification. There are no standards around age verification, no authorised companies, you have no idea what these third parties may do with your data and the risk of security leaks, identity theft and having your sexual preferences use to black mail you are all high risks. Your a teacher at a Catholic school and enjoy gay porn, if that got out, your out of a job.
The question is also will it work. I would think most children know one of there peers who could help them access an anonymous proxy, install a VPN, point them at TOR sites where the content could be god knows what. Getting around this is pretty easy.
The other issue is that it’s putting small sites out of business. They just cannot afford age verification. If your a small forum website that promotes cycling, and allow users to put up pictures of there routes and cycles, you run a risk. One of those accounts get hacked, someone uploads ‘porn’, your on holiday, and do not find out till its been on line for a week. Along come Offcom and your facing Jail or a significant fine. It’s not worth the risk, you close the site and create a Facebook page and let Facebook take the heat. You’re driving people into the arms of big tech and making the internet smaller and more controlled by a small number of billionaires.
The picture at the top of this post I consider clean and none offensive, but will everyone. Anyone now posting material is at risk. How many will close their sites?
At first we all used to have our own websites, then places like Facebook and Instagram came along, and drew us in.
Now with the algorithm dictating the terms, most sites promoting short form video in the hope of caching in on the TikTok trend, many promoting ideas that half of the population do not agree with; now many photographers are moving off these site that no longer seem to work for photographers. The question is where to go?
I have moved over to the Mastodon from Twitter a few years ago and recently started to post pictures to Pixelfed as well as Instagram. I have deleted my Facebook account, and am looking at getting rid of Instagram. As a photo sharing site it’s now pretty poor but I still find it useful to keep in contact with models.
Surprisingly one site from the past seems to be making a come back is Flickr I have recently started to post there again.
Doom strolling is certainly bad for us and being more selective with our social media can be nothing but good.
There are some settings I apply to every photo, one of these is copyright information. So beginning of each year I create some new default presets, This one Default2025 is for copyright information, I then have one for the main cameras so an M10 preset and a Z preset for example.
A bit of work at the start of each year, a new 2025 folder. structure and we are set for another year.
Like most people today, I tend to stream music rather than play physical media, but streaming services pay artists very little money.
So I occasionally buy physical media. So far this year I have bought eight new CD’s and a few second hand vinyl albums.
I rip my CD’s to Flac and import them into Roon to manage, thus I can stream them when out on my phone and around the house to any Roon end point.
So every few months I run a report in Roon on my listening, and any artist that comes up high on the list I go out and buy their CD. I have a physical copy and they get paid better.
Recently we had workmen digging up the road and they cut through the main fibre optic cable delivering broadband to the village.
We have very poor mobile phone signal in the village so suddenly no streaming services. With the several hundred CD’s I own ripped to my own media server I could still stream to devices around the house.
I also buy DVD’s still. These are also ripped to file and held on my media server, so we could still stream movies from our own library.
After my recent post on the Fuji X100 and also GAS. I had a look at second hand prices for Fuji X100. There keeping there value very well. Not quite as well as my Leica M4 which seems to have doubled in price since I bought it; but the original X100 is still going for about £500 on many sites.
With the release of the X100 VI prices on eBay have gone ridiculous with the new model hitting £5000! Many would argue that the retail price is too much for a fixed prime lens compact, but name another fixed lens compact on the market. We have the Fuji X100, Ricoh GR and the Leica Q, all targeting different markets.
Not much competition.
I was creating a new gallery for my more formal website when I noticed that once again Adobe Lightroom Classic Cloud Sync has stopped working.
As you can see above, I have blogged about this before and normally just going into to here, then relaunching Lightroom Classic is enough to fix it, but not today.
Luckily there is a hidden button to fix this.
If your on a Mac while in preferences and Lightroom Sync, hold down the Option Key (Alt on Windows) and a Rebuild Sync Data button appears, click on this and your Lightroom will restart and sync will be back working again.
Since before digital, in the dark room, photographers have been producing composite images, from multiple negatives, a landscape image with a sky from a different negative.
In my wedding images I shoot multiple shots of groups, and occasionally have to combine them to get a single image of everyone looking good at camera.
Model images, a tweak here and there to soften skin, remove a pimple.
But now with modern AI, we can create what ever kind of image we want. So how can we trust what we see?
Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the C2PA standard hopes to address this. Big players in the software world have signed up, like Microsoft and Adobe. Nikon and Leica are the first camera manufactures to sign up, but its Leica, working with their partners, the German government and Adobe that are the first to release a camera that supports this with a built in image authentication chip.
If you’re interested in Leica’s new M11-P I would suggest heading over to https://www.slack.co.uk/articles/the-leica-m11-p.html where Jonathan Slack will soon have a good overview of the camera.
Lightroom import dialogue box can be confusing, there are two options, simple and advance. I have on occasion gotten my import wrong myself, generally importing files to the wrong location but its an easy fix.bad credit loans uk direct lenders
I can think of a couple of other ways of importing photographs but rarely use them. Recently on YouTube I saw this and thought it was a easy way to import if you struggle with the other methods.
The video shows you how but basically create a folder in Lightroom where you want the files to go and then when highlighting that folder select import to this folder.
Simple and easy.
I still use the normal import methods, I have presents that apply things like basic develop settings and metadata which is the advantage of the normal import methods. Creating import, development and location presets to get a lot of the leg work done in advance can really speed up your work flow.
DPReview has been one of the top photography review sites and forum hosting for photographers for over twenty years.
This week we were all shocked to discover its closing down. I never knew that the site was owned by Amazon, and in the current cutbacks that Amazon are making the site is one of the loses.
There’s a lot of knowledge that is going to be lost. Hopefully Amazon can be persuaded to at least keep the site available for people to read even if there is no new updates, but so far to looks like the site will be deleted.