You really start to get the feeling that some of these less-friendly nations aren't even trying anymore. We recently covered how North Korea tried to scare the bejeezus (technical term) out of the States with an incredibly strange movie about a man dreaming of the nuclear annihilation of America, except they used video game footage to produce it. This wasn't the first of such instances, but you begin to get the feeling that the attempts, at best, are not getting any better and, at worst, are getting even more lame. As someone who grew up in the 80's, I have to pine for the days when a possible enemy nation really put in the effort required to scare the hell out of me. The USSR did this extremely well, causing more people to build almost-certain-to-fail bomb shelters than The Discovery Channel would know what to do with. Each silly attempt only makes me shake my head, mostly because I have to wonder who these guys think they're going to fool in the era of the internet and its global group of fact-checkers.

Which brings us to the new fighter jet, unveiled by Iran and named the Qaher-313, which could well actually be able to fly, but you can't know that from the photoshopped pictures released to state run media. Here's a comparison between a stock image of Mount Damavand, a well-known natural landmark in Iran, and a suspiciously similar image with the new jet flying over it.

Look, it's not that the jet doesn't look pretty sweet flying over Mount Damavand, it's just that if the majority world opinion is that your country is still using Russian war technology because you can't build working models on your own, an easily-discovered photoshop of your plane... you know... actually flying probably isn't going to impress anyone. Put some effort into it, guys. At least figure out a way to alter the cloud formations, so they aren't identical.

Digital photography has created a massive amount of incredible images. Although professional photography has and always will require quite a bit of skill, the rise of amateur photographers is unmistakable. We've pointed out some cool photography before, and here are just a few more examples.

• Family portraits aren't usually made from collages, but when family members are spread out all over the globe, combining Skype video stills will have to suffice. Rear projectors would be a bit better for this.... [url]
• People riding bikes without bikes are just floating above the street. It's just so easy to photoshop things out of a picture nowadays. [url]
• New moms often enjoy taking a lot of photos of their babies, but some moms also like to see their kid fly. Maybe in a few years, these "floating people" pictures will look like a dated image filter. [url]
• Let sleeping babies sleep.. and then take pictures of them in creative ways. Try this at home. [url]
• What can you do with a leaf blower and some good indoor lighting? Take some cool pictures or insert joke here. [url]

If you have some more free time, check out this unrelated, non-random Techdirt post.

The age-old rhetorical and theological question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" seems to be finding itself answered more and more with, "So that good people can make bad laws." Such is the case of a 17-year-old Citadel student who earlier this year found her personal contact information attached to a pornographic photo online.

High school junior Kelsey Upton was puzzled. Why was a stranger from Iowa sending her a text message?

Her confusion turned to terror last fall when she learned that the person who had sent the message had plucked her personal information from a pornographic website. Without her knowledge, someone had placed her name and phone number on the site next to a photo of a naked woman, in an explicit position, who somewhat resembled her.

Her father, a federal investigator who previously worked for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, traced the posting to a Citadel cadet, with the help of law enforcement officials. But to their dismay, Upton and her father learned that no crime was committed. Now Randy and Kelsey Upton, who live in Oxford, Ga., plan to meet with legislators and other public officials to try to make such actions a crime. "I want him arrested," said Kelsey Upton, now 17. "But if that won't happen, I want a law about this so someone doesn't just get a slap on the wrist."

Well, the Uptons are in luck. Sort of. The Agitator informs us that Georgia State Representative Pam Dickerson is looking to close this legal loophole by making it illegal to "intentionally cause an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction in such a manner that a reasonable person would conclude that the image depicted was that of the person so wrongfully identified." This would include using a person's name, telephone number, address or email address.

However, Dickerson feels that isn't enough. She then adds:

"Such identification shall also include the electronic imposing of the facial image of a person onto an obscene depiction."

Now, rather than just closing an unfortunate hole in Georgia's libel laws, Dickerson is aiming to make a pastime as old as the internet itself, photoshopping celebrities' heads onto porn stars' bodies, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

Now, I'm not here to suggest that the long and storied history of creating celebupr0n makes this a part of our rich cultural heritage and an unassailable act of free speech. What I am suggesting, however, is this:

1. Creating a law to deal with a very specific set of actions with no real precedence or evidence of mass abuse is the sort of thing that creates legal clutter and goes a long way towards explaining why it's illegal to tie your alligator to a fire hydrant in Michigan.

2. Existing libel/defamation laws should already be handling Photoshopped head transfers. There's really no reason to take this from the civil arena and turn it into a criminal act.

3. It looks as if the Citadel is already planning on handling this internally as an issue between two cadets. Adding another law to the books is redundant at best and, at worst, is just encouraging people to holler for new laws every time they've been wronged.

4. If this law goes through, it will be subject to endless expansion, much in the way cyberbullying legislation has been stretched to cover such ridiculous acts as eye rolling and so-called "deliberate exclusion." Offended citizens who find themselves photoshopped into other (non-sexual) compromising positions, like say, having their male heads attached to clothed female bodies or made to appear as though they endorse businesses and lifestyles that they clearly don't, will feel the law doesn't go far enough. The internet is a very inventive place while most lawmakers are not.

5. It will be ridiculed mercilessly. See also this post (possibly NSFW) and this clip (possibly not safe for your brain):

We've covered the uncanny valley of various visual works before, but it's interesting that synthetic speech doesn't seem quite as polished as digital photo and video editing. Apple's Siri might be able to respond with some pretty witty comebacks, but everyone can still tell that the voice is computer generated. Here are a few interesting links on artificially-generated sounds and voices.

• AutoTune is so last century -- bringing back voices from the dead is the new zombie world order. Vocaloid researchers have developed software that can re-create a person's singing voice without recordings of the person singing every syllable possible. [url]
• Audio editing software is becoming more like Photoshop -- and pretty soon everyone will be able to create podcasts that sound like NPR. This kind of software has been around for a while, but it's getting more sophisticated and has more tools for extracting and refining voices and sound effects. [url]
• Stephen Hawking's voice is in need of some new maintenance and upgrades, but apparently the company that made the hardware for his voice synthesizer went out of business. Hmm. How was Hawking's rap persona created? [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Photoshop has pretty much become a generic verb for altering a digital image. It's so common to use software to fix flaws in photos that it's a bit difficult to find unaltered photos now. Well, software will come to the rescue for that, too, and it'll help people determine which images have been touched-up. Here are just a few examples of some cool photo-enhancing tools.

• Adobe presented a photo fixing feature that can almost magically un-blur digital images. That video could use some "enhance" capabilities for itself. [url]
• Xerox labs has created software that can predict whether or not a photography will be aesthetically pleasing. Beauty is still in the eye of the beholder, but now there's an algorithm to help predict it. [url]
• Virtual fashion models are about to replace human models in advertising. H&M has already started using completely computer-generated lingerie/swimsuit models on its website. Some people are complaining about being tricked by the fake people, but fake people aren't going away anytime soon. [url]
• Maybe you can fool some of the people some of the time, but there's software that will point out photoshopped images. "It seems the scientific community is very aggressive about beautifying its images." [url]
• To discover more interesting photography-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Digital cameras have really made the field of photography much more approachable. Even monkeys can take some pretty decent photos. So how hard can it really be to take some nice shots? Here are just a few projects that show a bit of the spectrum of artful photography.

• If you want the subjects of your photos to look really small, take a picture of them next to a really big coin. Remember: it's not counterfeiting if you make coins the size of a coffee table... [url]
• Tilt-shift photographic effects can be created in a few different ways -- to fabricate images of a crowd of people, looking like ants. Someday this is what The Sims will look like. [url]
• If you think photography is easy, get ready to be mocked. If you like seeing photos with really bad composition and cheesy photoshop effects, youarenotaphotographer is the blog for you. [url]
• Who knew that photos of pregnant women could become an internet meme like planking? Thankfully, there don't seem to be any photos of pregnant women planking. [url]
• To discover more interesting photography-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

There's a story making the rounds about how the UK Advertising Standards Authority is banning certain cosmetics advertisements including Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington, because the images are way too Photoshopped. The ASA says that ads can't mislead, and the makeup company (in this case L'Oreal) did not provide enough evidence that the digital alterations did not, in fact, mislead.

Now, this story was interesting on its own, but what made it even more interesting is that another makeup firm, Estee Lauder, seems to be in a legal dispute, for the exact opposite reason. Ima Fish recently alerted us to the news that model Caroline Louise Forsling had sued the company for the following advertisement: She claims that the photo was just a "test shot" before any makeup was applied, and was for a different product. She claims that the showing of her untouched-up face on the left has 'irreparably' damaged her career. Of course, in suing over this, she effectively admits that the image on the left is the untouched-up image. She could have just as easily told people that the right-hand side was the "real" image, and the left-hand one was digitally altered, and gotten on with her life.

Either way, it should be noted that in both of these stories, they're about supposed "anti-aging" products, and I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that digitally altering images is how such products are advertised, rather than showing any actual before and after shots, because I imagine "real results" are likely to vary from what's seen in any of these ads.

The market for digital cameras has been undergoing some significant changes in recent years. Instead of more megapixels, consumers are now chasing higher and higher ISO numbers. But pretty soon, it looks like cameras will be able to handle some computationally-intense operations and offer some amazing image processing functions. Here are some quick links to some existing and upcoming cool cameras.

• The Lytro camera is getting a lot of recent publicity over its after-shooting-focus function. But some of the examples of it seem a lot like Photoshop magic.... [url]
• The Stanford Frankencamera combines common digital camera hardware with some software tricks to create a "camera 2.0" gadget. When will cameras (without a phone function) be sold with a monthly wireless plan? [url]
• The first plenoptic camera has been on the market for a little while now, sold by Raytrix. Uh, $30,000 still sounds like a bit much for a 3 megapixel camera... [url]
• To discover more interesting photography-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

And here we go again. Apparently a few websites had posted some photos that allegedly showed actor Jake Gyllenhaal stretching in his underwear. Supposedly, the image is faked. However, that hasn't stopped Gyllenhaal's lawyers from trying a somewhat novel approach to it, demanding websites take it down, because the image (among other things) could be seen as defamation: How is that possibly "defamation"? As Eriq Gardner notes in his writeup (the one linked above), if the image really is Photoshopped, then he isn't stretching, so that's perhaps something "false." But it really does seem like his lawyers are very much stretching. It's hard to see how this causes any "harm" to Gyllenhaal. In fact, it would seem that having lawyers send out silly takedown notices like this does more harm to his reputation than the photo in question.

Thankfully, it appears that some sites aren't backing down, with at least one noting that the takedown itself now makes the photo newsworthy: "We're keeping the photo up, since it hasn't been proven fake and because their letter bumped it from 'funny and cute' to 'actually newsworthy.'" That site, Queerty, also explains why this isn't defamation:

Oh, really? Defaming him? Well, we don't like defaming anyone. You might even say that we are gays and lesbians allied against defamation.

But what exactly is the defamation here? Is is that people might think, wrongly, that Jake wears underpants? Or that his reputation is sullied by the idea that he allowed someone to photograph him without pants on? Or that he stayed in what looks like a cheap motel?

Simply calling something defamation doesn't make it so, as Howard Stern learned in 2009 when he tried -- and failed -- to sue someone for suggesting that he's gay. Is that what's going on here?

Jake's a public figure, and we can talk about him if we want to. We can even speculate about what he looks like in his underwear. We can't -- and won’t -- claim that this picture of him is definitely authentic, since we just don't know.

I wonder if these claims of "defamation by photoshop" will start to become more common. Perhaps it would be good to get some court rulings on the books that show this is a ridiculous claim.

Update: Clarified a bit in the middle to note that it appears that it was the agency, not Aniston's representatives directly who are making this threat to Gawker.

You may recall late last year the legal threats that came down after some designers started discussing the possibility that a Demi Moore photo on the cover of W magazine may have been Photoshopped in an odd way. The lawyers came out and threatened those who were talking about it, leading the story to get much more attention (as per usual).

However, it appears that some Hollywood types still haven't quite figured this out. Apparently Jennifer Aniston's the representatives of photo agency are threatening to sue Gawker because the site dared to post an image that it claims is a pre-Photoshopped photo of Aniston, which the agency people insist are doctored. Either way, Gawker is standing up for its fair use rights, and as this is the story, it seems entirely newsworthy to publish the image in question: Once again, it looks like an attempt to hide something has only served to turn that into the story itself. You would think that people would recognize this already, so it's a bit surprising that they don't.