A little earlier today, we reported on how Sohail Mamdani of BorrowLenses had discovered that one particular Nikon D600 he was testing was consistently overexposing photographs by two stops. After searching long and hard for the cause, he stumbled upon the culprit: the D600 wasn’t closing the aperture blades to the correct opening size.
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Back in October, we wrote that the Nikon D600 suffers from excessive sensor dust in the upper left hand corner of the frame — something many owners have been reporting and a flaw confirmed by review sites such as DPReview. Toronto-based artist Kyle Clements wanted to test this himself, so he bought a new D600, pointed it at a white piece of paper, shot 1000 frames, and created the time-lapse video above.
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Have you been getting rashes on your skin, or redness and irritation in your eyes? Do you own a Canon WFT-E7A Wireless File Transmitter? Those two things might be related. If you remember, a couple of months ago, Canon recalled tens of thousands of Rebel T4i/650D DSLRs due to an issue with their rubber grips that caused allergic reactions. The rubber had been overloaded with too much of certain ingredients, leading to an unexpected chemical reaction that caused white flaking. It turns out the faulty rubber was used beyond the Rebel: Canon has just released a product advisory warning that its file transmitter may have the same flaw.
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A quick update on the “light leak phenomenon” on the 5D Mark III that Canon confirmed last week: after emailing Canon about the issue recently, photographer birdbrain received the following response:
Further to your enquiry we would like to inform you that we very recently (in April) have become aware of this and is now a known issue with the EOS 5D Mark III model. The AE sensor in the camera detects the light from the LCD panel when it is turned on and the exposure value will be altered. The change is not significant as it will be altered by approximately 1/3rd of a stop but can be noticeable. You can continue to use your 5D Mark III and the LCD screen can be turned off to receive the correct exposure.
The video above shows examples of what this 1/3 stop difference does for nighttime photographs. The issue definitely isn’t a huge one (don’t cancel your orders), but the 5D Mark III is a $3,500 camera and it’ll be interesting to see how Canon decides to deal with this flaw.
(via DPReview via Canon Watch)
The private photographs on your phone might not be as private as you think. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that iOS has a loophole that allows third-party apps who have access to location information to also access (and copy) your entire photo library without any further notification or warning. A couple days later, Android was also found to have a loophole that’s even worse — any app that can access the Internet can copy photos to a remote server! Both companies have acknowledged the privacy flaws and are currently working on fixes for them. Welcome to the scary world of Internet-connected cameras!
Image credit: iPhone Camera by Nico Kaiser
A recently discovered flaw in Facebook’s abuse reporting tool allowed anyone to access private photographs of other users, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Until it was fixed today, the reporting tool allowed anyone who reported a public photograph’s owner to also peruse that user’s images, both public and private. After members of a bodybuilding forum discovered the security hole, they proceeded to target Zuckerberg’s account and publish a number of his private photographs online. This comes a week after the FTC slapped Facebook’s wrist over deceptive privacy practices.
Quip is an iPhone application that provides simple “private” photo sharing without MMS. A flaw in the service was posted to Reddit a day ago by FlamingZebra90:
Here’s the deal. As stated in the title, QuipText is a service that lets iPhone users send picture messages to others over the internet. The service works by saving the image as a webpage on their server with its own unique URL and then texting the person in question the url. The only problem? They’re only using 5 alphanumeric, noncase-sensitive characters for the URL, meaning it can be brute forced in a few seconds.
So basically, the way in which photos are accessed is similar to services like TwitPic, with the difference being that users of Quip had the expectation of privacy for their photo sharing. Before long, tech-savvy folk had whipped up automatic scripts for harvesting these private photographs, and the story has erupted in the past day as thousands of private photographs have been released to the Internet.
Ish, a founder of Quip responded to the Reddit thread stating:
As soon as this post came to our attention, we immediately shut down our servers. We have also now disabled all S3 access and have started to systematically secure all files in the system. We will not bring the system back up until we have adequate security around all files shared over Quip.
I apologize to our users for this security breach and promise we will do everything in our power to make sure none of their information is exposed once we bring the service back up.
The vision for Quip has always been to provide users a quick, simple, and affordable way for iPhone users to send picture messages without paying exorbitant carrier fees. We are a small company (3 people) but we will work as quickly as possible to bring back the service up in a safe and secure manner.
The makers of Quip have since completely shut down the service in an attempt to protect whatever photos hadn’t been breached yet (if any). Furthermore, the app is no longer available from the iTunes store.
A takeaway for those in the photo-sharing business: if your users have an expectation of privacy, those photos had better be inaccessible to the general public.
(via News.com.au)
Image credit: Iphone sunset in the Andes by Gonzalo Baeza Hernández
