scandal

Olympus Crisis Deepens: Allegations of Fraud and Plummeting Stock

Update: Olympus has released an official response to the allegations.

Since Olympus abruptly fired CEO Michael Woodford (pictured, on left) four days ago, the company's stock price has fallen from roughly ¥2,480 to its current price of ¥1,417, a 43% drop that wiped out nearly $4 billion in value. As we reported yesterday, Woodford is now asking the UK to investigate the company's financial practices, and is claiming that he was booted when on the verge of exposing fraud.

Swedish Wildlife Photographer of the Year Admits to Faking Photos

A huge photo scandal erupted over in Sweden this past weekend after a well-known and award-winning wildlife photographer admitted to faking some of his photographs. Terje Helleso -- a nature photographer who was named Nature Photographer of the Year by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in 2010 -- was discovered to have published multiple images in which stock photographs of hard-to-find animals were Photoshopped into nature scenes.

Where’s the Big Privacy Brouhaha Over Serial Numbers in EXIF Data?

On August 4, 2006, AOL published a text file containing 20 million searches done by 650,000 users over a 3-month period for research purposes. Although the company anonymized the data by showing the users as numerical IDs, people soon realized that many people searched for personally identifiable information (e.g. their names), allowing real names to be put to unique IDs, thus revealing the search history of that individual. After the media caught wind of this, the whole thing was known as the AOL search data scandal.

Hillary Clinton Gets ‘Shopped Out of Iconic War Room Photo by Newspaper

Pete Souza's iconic photo of Obama and his national security team in the Situation Room has become extremely well known in the span of a week, so it's unlikely that any reputable media outlet would dare alter the photo in any way -- but that's exactly what one newspaper did. Orthodox Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung has a policy of never publishing photographs of women, and decided to publish Obama's situation room photograph with Hillary Clinton and counterterrorism director Audrey Tomason Photoshopped out of the frame.

Controversy After Vegan Magazine Found to Use Non-Vegan Stock Photos

In the past week or two there has been an interesting controversy regarding the use of stock photography: vegan blogger quarrygirl.com published a post on April 13th accusing the nations leading vegan magazine VegNews of using non-vegan stock photos to illustrate its vegan recipes. An example presented is a "Vegan Spare Ribs" article that uses a Photoshopped iStockPhoto image of actual barbecue spare ribs (shown above).

Photo of Lunar Eclipse Over New Jersey Causes a Stir

A couple days ago Flickr published a blog post featuring a handful of member photographs of the December 2010 lunar eclipse. The first image in the post was "The 2010 Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse over Jersey City, NJ" (shown above) by photographer Steve Kelly.