A young Israeli soldier sparked outrage around the world and Web this past week after uploading an ill-advised photo on Instagram. The photo, pictured above, shows the back of a young Palestinian boy’s head in the crosshairs of 20-year-old Israeli sniper Mor Ostrovski’s rifle. Read more…
It’s a story that’s becoming more and more common: someone uploads tactless photos to the Internet, the Internet disapproves and collectively pounces on the person. It happened after Hurricane Sandy when a Brazilian model decided to do a photo shoot amidst the devastation, and it has happened again. The target of the Internet’s fury this time is a woman named Lindsey Stone, who posted the above photograph to her Facebook page.
Read more…
In mid-January, Nikon sent an letter out to independent camera repair technicians across the US, informing them that “it will no longer make repair parts available for purchase by repair facilities that have not been authorized by Nikon Inc. to perform camera repairs.” After July 13th, 2012, unauthorized repair shops will no longer be able to repair Nikon cameras — a huge part of their business — with official manufacturer-approved parts. iFixit writes,
Scott Jarvie, a full-time photographer, outlined his concerns with the policy in a detailed Google+ post. He demonstrates how silly the new policy seems by comparing cameras to cars. What if your car broke, and you went to your favorite mechanic, but he told you that you’re out of luck? Though he could fix your car by tomorrow, your car’s manufacturer will no longer allow him to buy the necessary parts. Instead, you have to send your car to your car manufacturer’s own repair shop (which, if we’re taking this analogy all the way, has a much poorer BBB rating than your own local shop) or one of two dozen manufacturer-authorized repair shops—oh, you don’t live near one of those? There’s not even one in your state? Too bad. Forget driving to work this week; you’re going to have to ship in your car.
If you want to speak out against this new policy, there’s an online petition you can sign that has already raised thousands of signatures.
How Nikon is Killing Camera Repair [iFixit]
Image credit: No more photos temporarily by Stefan Marks
It looks like Imagelogr, a new search engine for images, has gotten off on the wrong foot. Only weeks old, the service has sparked quite a response from photographers after it became clear that the service was offering copyrighted photographs for download without any links or attribution.
Their “about us” section states,
Imagelogr.com is an image & picture search engine. We try to index pretty much every picture & image currently available on the free internet. With our powerful search engine finding these images should be fairly easy.
The problem was, photographs that weren’t “free” were being indexed as well, including Flickr images marked “All Rights Reserved.”
After learning of the service, notable Flickr photog Thomas Hawk wrote a post on his blog today titled, “Is Imagelogr.com Trying to Be the Largest Copyright Infringer of All Time?“:
Imagelogr claims to be scraping the entire “free web” and seems to have hit Flickr especially hard, copying full-sized images of yours and mine to their own servers where they are hosting them without any attribution or links back to the original image in violation of all available licenses on Flickr. If people on Imagelogr want to they can manipulate your images, rotate them, see them at different sizes up to 300% and even download the images with a download button directly from the site. [...] The site currently boasts to be tracking over 24 *billion* (yes, billion with a B) images. If their numbers are true, this may in fact be the largest image grab in the history of Flickr.
A thread about the service was also created in the Flickr forums, but was quickly closed by the Flickr staff, since they felt that the thread was going down “Lynch Mob Road”.
Hours later, the service was taken offline, and was replaced with a simple message stating,
Imagelogr.com is currently offline as we are improving the website. Due to copyright issues we are now changing some stuff around to make people happy. Please check back soon.
We don’t know much about this service, and hadn’t heard of it prior to today’s events. Their domain name was registered last month, and details are so non-existant that it feels almost like a class project. However, the fact that they’ve indexed 24 billion photos seems to argue against that possibility.
When they come back online, you might want to type in your Flickr username to see if your photographs show up.
Image credit: Screenshot by Thomas Hawk
