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Here it is, my final editorial, which will run in the Technique on Friday:

In the world of amateur photography, images range in quality from well-exposed landscapes and well-timed action images to the worst snapshots, complete with redeye and motion blur. We have all taken our share of each, and thanks to online sharing services like Flickr and Facebook’s photo sharing, it is easier than ever for others to view and critique our work. Eventually we wonder how much of this variation comes from the equipment that each person uses and how much can be attributed directly to skill.

At this point, most Tech students have probably owned at least one camera, and many of those have since upgraded to digital cameras at least once over. Some of us prefer the convenience of digital, while a few stick to the nostalgia of film. No one can name a true victor in the interminable war between film and digital, but at this point the relative convenience of digital makes it the choice of the majority. Thus, the digital camera purchasing decision typically comes down to a tradeoff between cost and quality, with the cheapest point-and-shoots hovering around $100 and the better consumer cameras running upwards of $1000.

When I admire the work of professional photographers, I cannot help but wonder how much of their product’s quality is simply the result of their photography equipment. Many of these photographers own expensive digital cameras whose costs rival Tech’s annual in-state tuition. Pro photo equipment is often capable of very high resolution, greater sensitivity in low light, and capturing many images within a short period of time, which improves the photographer’s ability to catch action at the right moment. When you look at the photos of a professionally-photographed wedding, you are often seeing the result of these camera improvements, as well as the benefits of custom lighting and expensive lenses.

So are professional photographers cheating? Are they only getting better results because they can afford more expensive cameras? Consider the opposite situation. Can a rich CEO replace his point-and-shoot with a collection of pro cameras and lenses and see a vast improvement? Likely not. On the other hand, could a pro photographer travel to Hawaii with a point-and-shoot and achieve the results he normally achieves? Again, probably not. Good photo equipment simply makes it easier to translate a clear photographic concept into reality; it does not help the user create those concepts. Much like an Atlanta Symphony violinist produces the best quality on a great violin, a good camera can only raise the glass ceiling of a photographer’s potential; it does not turn the 2nd-year violin student into a virtuoso.

The beginner photographer should choose a camera like the budding rock musician chooses a guitar. One’s money is wasted on a camera that offers too much power for one’s skill, even more so because digital cameras are always rapidly improving in quality and value. Once a person has improved such that he is bounded by the camera rather than skill, that is the best time to upgrade.

Okay, so we have clarified that the photographer makes the camera work, but the camera cannot make the photo. What about post processing? This issue is a bit more controversial. From Google’s Picasa to Adobe Photoshop, software has made it easier than ever to turn a weak photo into a piece of art. With so many built-in enhancement filters and easy adjustments, an absolute beginner can open a photo and automatically make it pop. Software has yet to reach the point where it can improve more subjective attributes like composition, and it can hardly tell you what to photograph in the first place. However, Picasa can easily turn a poorly exposed, out-of-focus, redeyed image into a decent photo.

Through these products we have given beginners the tools to repair certain mistakes that were previously only solvable through practice and acquired skill. Is this cheating yet? I am sure there are those out there who would love to keep these skills under lock and key, to be accessed only by those who have paid their dues. These are the same people who scoff at digital images, instead choosing to shoot black-and-white film processed in their own darkroom. There is certainly something to be said for the happiness of controlling your photography’s entire workflow, but it does not necessarily make you a better photographer. Do we offer more respect to writers who insist on using a typewriter rather than a computer?

It seems only fitting that we should give everyone access to every tool available, so that everyone can enjoy the thrill of seeing their work achieve all it can. While we would all like to know that other people appreciate of our work, everyone takes photos for their own enjoyment, and it is good to see that improvements in camera technology and image-processing software have allowed more people to experience the joys of photography.

It's editorial time again! This is my editorial for the 'Nique that will run on Friday:

Say it ain’t so! It sounds like Brit Brit has been dumped by her latest beau, Isaac Cohen. K-Fed would be celebrating, but he’s too busy firing up his Grammy-prospective music career.

Each time I wrap up my biweekly trip to Publix, standing in line to add my frozen dinners to the checkout conveyor, innumerous tabloids scream in my direction with the latest happenings of the Hollywood universe. “Norah Jones: I Was Told to Lose Weight for Movie,” says People magazine, and “Britney Spear’s On-the-Go Wardrobe Change.” Rarely do I fail to chuckle at the absurdity of the bold, capitalized text, but not because the content itself is humorous. Instead, I ponder why people lend that sort of “investigative journalism” any value.

While some people may find it fascinating that Lindsay Lohan was caught wearing conflicting colors while filling up her car, I can only wonder how there was no other news of greater importance. Why do people trouble themselves with the intimate details of complete strangers? Perhaps they do not consider such celebrities to be strangers; after watching Geraldo Rivera’s E! True Hollywood Story (THS as the hipsters now call it), I would probably know more about his past and present than I know about my lab partner.

I would guess that this infatuation is not the fault of the general populace. With such a huge media machine covering news of the rich and famous, it takes an active effort not to keep up with the latest status of Brangelina’s relationship. When Anna Nicole Smith’s death was covered in excruciating detail nonstop this past weekend, Congress could have declared war on Switzerland and we would all be none the wiser.

Sometimes I wonder if celebrities deserve the sort of treatment they get from the press. Most actors and musicians make an active decision to enter a world that has no secrets. They must know to expect a bit of stalking and candid photography once they reach a certain level of fame. It seems that the most extensively covered celebrities actively pursue their place in the news, and they surely realize that there is no on/off switch within the press. If a celebrity wants everyone to know what she does in public, she must be willing to let them find out what she does on her own time.

I’ll admit that not all celebrity news is worthless. It matters when music artists announce a tour schedule, or when a new movie trailer is released. This is information that has the potential to affect me directly, whether it means beginning the search for concert tickets or making movie-watching plans. On the other hand, if Scarlett Johansson starts dating Justin Timberlake, does that mean I should change some aspect of my life? Should I start dressing differently to get her to notice me?

Perhaps we lend more credence to this sort of news because it truly does represent some of our media’s best efforts to produce investigative journalism. While many bash the media (and rightfully so) for covering stories based purely on sound bites and buzzwords without getting to the meat of a story, celebrity news proves to be an exception. How else would we know that Julia Roberts has given birth to twins but for the relentless pursuits of People magazine, who were likely stalking around every nearby hospital for weeks in advance, waiting for any sign of such vital “breaking news.”

What offends me is not the fact that celebrities are stalked for tabloid headlines, nor am I bothered at being given more information about the world in general. What offends me is how so many man-hours and other resources are wasted to bring me information like this. For the most part, the articles that appear in such tabloids provide no benefit to humanity except to keep curious minds busy, while much more important information goes unrecognized and unheard by the masses. What if the checkout lines contained headlines like, as Slate.com recently put it, “Bush’s Korea Plan Is Surprisingly Clintonian”? How much more effective would our democracy be if all those muck-rakers spent their time studying policy, then translating it into terms that we can all understand? We would certainly be much more educated voters.

Here's my latest editorial, which will run in tomorrow's Technique.




On November 2, the Thursday evening before the election, HBO aired a documentary titled “Hacking Democracy” that described the pursuits of Beverly (Bev) Harris as she explored the process and parties involved in making our republic function. Bev is a regular woman who took it upon herself to investigate what she calls the “secrecy” of the system after noticing irregularities in the 2000 presidential election, such as Al Gore’s vote count of -16022 (yes, that’s a negative number) that appeared on voting machines in Volusia County, FL. Since then, she has become a front runner in the effort to force the makers of these electronic voting machines to be more honest about their equipment, open up their processes, and take greater responsibility for failures in the past. Her organization’s website, www.blackboxvoting.org, describes their efforts and allows others to get involved in the fight.

In general, I make a strong attempt to shy away from blind paranoia about technology. Many of us at Tech have witnessed the phobias that people can display concerning machinery they cannot understand. We can, however, also appreciate the weakness of blind faith in technology. The best way to strike a compromise is either to learn enough about the process to make a conclusion, or to take the word of another trusted source that has learned about the technology.

For example, my latest credit card contains in it an RFID chip that allows me to simply wave it at a reader in many retail establishments and charge my account without ever handing the card over to another person. I welcome a new convenience like this, but knowing the general insecurities of other wireless protocols like WiFi and Bluetooth makes me wary to trust this new feature. I have been reading up on the protocol used in some credit cards and can only determine that some are safe and some are not. Thus, I must decide whether to keep the card and the additional convenience, or practice my Dremel skills on the tiny chip, and I will likely err on the side of drilling a hole in my card. (I can call it a creative outlet!)

The main idea is that any given technology has risks and benefits, and if the risk and cost of failure exceed the benefit, the product must be improved or it must no longer be used. According to the documentary, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Diebold Election Systems, the top two electronic voting machine manufacturers in the US, provide approximately 80% of the nation’s voting machines. Diebold also manufactures ATMs and other security products whose reliability are critical to the company and its banking customers.

One might assume that a company whose ATMs have been shown to be generally secure should be expected to uphold such quality standards in all its products. However, one major difference exists between ATMs and voting machines: constant quality control by customers. Each time we use an ATM, many records are produced in various forms that can confirm the validity and accuracy of the transaction. We can request a receipt that shows our new balance, check our statement online, as well as count the physical cash that might have been dispensed. Voting machines, however, are shrouded in secrecy. The customer (the voter) cannot confirm that his or her vote was actually counted, and in many cases individual votes can never be confirmed afterward. We are forced to take the machine by its word, which implies trusting the manufacturer and the people it employs.

The utopia of electronic voting is a world where machines use open-source software running on well-scrutinized open hardware. Ideally, a process should be set up by which a corporation publishes its source code and hardware designs for public scrutiny, along with offering a small cash reward for the discovery of security flaws. After a few years, the computer science community will likely have found all exploitable flaws and the product can be released for use by voters. Plenty of open-source projects out there exist to prove that this method works, and computer scientists have long known that security through obscurity is no security at all. I can imagine that thousands of college students and researchers would love to participate in this process, and we would see our democracy at one of its finest moments.

So what can we do to achieve this utopia? Unfortunately, there are a few major companies who own the bulk of the market with huge pockets and huge government contracts. Our first baby steps will likely be litigation against these corporations that will force them to open up their processes for scrutiny by an independent organization. The failures of this election should be a catalyst for this step. However, we cannot settle simply for closed scrutiny. In the end, only the utopia I have described will safeguard our democracy and return us to the status of “world’s greatest democracy.”

Tomorrow the 'Nique will contain my editoral about music downloading. For all the sleepless and international folks, here's the early release. It's not that great and some of my arguments need some development, but hopefully most people will get the gist of it. DRM is bad and I hope that it goes away, eventually.

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Several weeks back, when SGA announced that Tech would be participating in the Ruckus music service, I was apathetic at best. I have become accustomed to music downloading services having a poor selection, costing too much, and being encumbered by annoying digital rights management (DRM) that makes it impossible to listen to the music the way I would like. To be honest, I was ready to slam Ruckus for all these faults before I even tried it.

In reality Ruckus is not immune to these problems, but because it is free for the school and for its users I am not so concerned about the shortcomings. It suffers from the same DRM problems as all the other popular music services and requires a local client for downloads and license validation. This client also shows an annoying Flash banner ad at all times, but I recognize that this is the only way the service can remain free. Of course, “free” does not hold completely true since the service still charges 99¢ to allow the track to be played on portable devices. If any download service wants to achieve the ubiquity of the compact disc, there are some major changes that must be made.

For one, even the most popular music sharing service, iTunes, does not offer tracks by artists like Radiohead or the Beetles because those bands refuse to move forward with internet-based sales. Some artists cite the inability to maintain the integrity of the “album” since most services allow downloads by track, others are not convinced that piracy can be controlled.

Like iTunes, all of the legitimate music stores that offer the most well-known artists restrict downloads with DRM, which limits the devices and players that are capable of supporting those downloads. iTunes downloads, for one, only play in the iTunes software and on iPods because Apple has shown no interest in licensing their FairPlay DRM technology to other manufacturers. It’s hard to blame them when the iTunes Music Store is by far the most popular download service and the iPod is the most popular standalone player. However, I’ve known people who previously bought music on iTunes and were surprised to find that it would not play on their Creative-branded devices, which only support PlaysForSure, a DRM standard created by Microsoft. These little surprises send people running back to illegitimate sources that offer files that are not held back by such restrictions.

Unfortunately for all download services, the record industry (RIAA) refuses to support services that are not encumbered by DRM. They seem to believe that all music listeners will be ready to make millions (no, billions!) of pirate copies of downloaded music if they are allowed to purchase unrestricted MP3s (which do not contain DRM). In some ways this is probably true in the present day, but I think there is a solution. Most music downloaders can be grouped into one of four categories:

1. People who only download music legally for moral reasons
2. People who only download legally because they fear the RIAA’s lawsuits
3. People who download illegally but feel somewhat guilty
4. People who download illegally and see nothing wrong with it

The RIAA would like to move us into one of the first two groups, but it is clear that their immediate goal is to move everyone into group 2. However, I think that group 1 would have much stronger staying power. In an ideal world, all users would be in group 1 and DRM would be unnecessary. In this world, music downloads play on any device or player without annoying license renewals.

I think this utopia is attainable if the recording industry would simply take all the cash it spends suing its potential customer base and instead put it toward an advertising campaign that explains where all our money goes, and how piracy hurts the artists. That assumes, of course, that the musicians actually benefit from our purchases. If that is not currently the case, then the music industry has other issues to solve before it can convince its customers that piracy actually hurts artists. Otherwise, the users will all move into group 5: people who download illegally just to spite the recording industry itself.

Two weeks ago the Technique published a letter to the editor, authored by Ruckus president Mike Bebel, in which he thanked the student body for participating in the service’s record day of music downloads. I am happy to participate in this experiment, and I encourage others to do the same. Until the recording industry learns to trust its users, DRM is here to stay, so I will use Ruckus to check out new artists but will keep buying those great used, DRM-free CDs on eBay.