Underexposed

Firefox add-on infected with Trojan

Stephen Shankland — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:24:00 GMT

A Trojan-infected Vietnamese language pack for the Firefox Web browser was available for download from the open-source Web browser's official add-on site for months.

Mozilla, which oversees the project, announced the problem on its security blog on Wednesday, saying people should disable the add-on pack for now.

"Everyone who ...

Linux video project evades DMCA, back on Google Code

Stephen Shankland — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:26:00 GMT

An open-source project called CoreAVC-for-Linux is back up and running at Google Code after a copyright tangle with a company called CoreCodec.

Google removed the CoreAVC-for-Linux project after CoreCodec said the software violated its copyright in a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "takedown" letter dated April 30. "We have directly ...

Google: Unicode conquers ASCII on the Web

Stephen Shankland — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:35:00 GMT

I picture it happening this way. The Roman alphabet is on the run, pursued by a much larger army of Arabic characters with long scimitar-like ligatures, Chinese characters that look like throwing stars, and European peasant letters bristling with umlauts, cedillas, and tildes.

Unicode now is the most common character ...

Google yanks open-source project after copyright complaint

Stephen Shankland — Mon, 05 May 2008 04:55:00 GMT

In response to a copyright complaint, Google has taken down an open-source project called CoreAVC-for-Linux it had hosted on its Web site.

Google didn't share details, but said on the project site that it removed CoreAVC-for-Linux from its Google Code site after receiving a complaint under the Digital Millennium ...

Adobe toys with standardizing DNG raw photo format

Stephen Shankland — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:27:00 GMT

Adobe Systems is discussing potential standardization of its Digital Negative (DNG) format for digital images, a company executive has said.

Most people are fine with plain-old JPEG for their images, but higher-end cameras can produce more flexible and higher-quality "raw" photos that are encoded with camera makers' proprietary formats. Because ...

Microsoft hopes new photo tool will boost Windows

Stephen Shankland — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:50:00 GMT

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and on Thursday plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.

Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. ...

Adobe guru to improve Windows interface

Stephen Shankland — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:58:00 GMT

It looks like Mark Hamburg, an Adobe Systems Photoshop and Lightroom programming guru, will be leading work to give Microsoft Windows a better user interface.

And given the dramatic user interface differences between earlier and later Adobe projects that Hamburg worked on, that raises some very intriguing possibilities.

Adobe Photoshop

...

Photoshop guru leaves Adobe for Microsoft

Stephen Shankland — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:43:00 GMT

Update 12:11 p.m. PDT: I added a comment from Adobe.

Mark Hamburg worked on Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Lightroom. Lightroom 2.0, in beta now, gets local editing abilities, shown above.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Mark Hamburg, a programmer who worked on Photoshop since version 2.0 and helped

...

Photobucket shares interface, matches Flickr

Stephen Shankland — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Photobucket, is making a significant change aimed to weave the widely used photo-sharing site more tightly into the Web 2.0 fabric.

The company is releasing an application programming interface (API) for its site, said Chief Executive Alex Welch. That means that ordinary developers will be able to build more ...

Hardy Heron reflects Ubuntu Linux ambitions

Stephen Shankland — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:33:00 GMT

Correction 8 p.m. PT: I included the wrong duration for regular Ubuntu releases. It's 18 months.

Canonical plans to release Hardy Heron, its newest version of Ubuntu Linux on Thursday, and Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth isn't being shy and retiring about it.

"This is our most significant ...