iphone vulnerability: what's at stake

After its launch boosted by feats of advertisement and cleverly induced impatience and enthusiasm on the part of gadget lovers in general and Apple supporters in particular, the iphone got on the news again a little while ago... Experts of a computer security consultancy (Independent Security Evaluators) said they had managed to take full control over an iphone, which Apple would readily describe as a mobile phone ahead of its time.

It is by observing how the iphone connects to the Internet that our experts have discovered the flaw. They claim that the wireless connection device used by the iphone to access the Internet makes it possible to hack, thus enabling a third party to completely control the phone and take a peek at any private information stored inside.

To the experts of Independent Security Evaluators, it meant that the handset was vulnerable to attacks. In two weeks they were able to discover a flaw, and what flaw: the targeted iphone disclosed all sort of personal data, from SMS to call history, not to mention contacts... In fact, according to ISE, any file they wanted, they could get.

To cap it all, there was suspicion that a hacker could make phone calls at the expense of the iphone owner and perhaps even use it to spy on them...

The safety of mobile phones has become a hot topic as they get more powerful and come to behave more and more like home computers. And in this context, the launch of the iPhone - which adds a music player, an Internet browser and the touchscreen to the old regular mobile phone - puts the computer security industry in an stronger position than ever.

More on digital photographs: editing and printing.

Photoshop now includes (since the last two versions) support for raw files, which, unfortunately, is not the case for all cameras. This refinement is the privilege of relatively top of the range devices; however, as the very first ones appeared around 2003 - 2004, there is undoubtedly a few bargains to be grabbed on e-bay.

If your camera does not support the raw format, you'll still have lots of possibilities to get your shots to look better and more appealing, and even downright stunning. But before doing anything else, if you intend to print them yourself, your first task should be to properly adjust and calibrate your printer. Once done, you can then fire up your image editing software and go to the image menu and select the type of editing you think is needed. You'll find there is a wide variety of options there. It is advisable to begin with adjusting levels, i.e. setting the white and the black point, which will allow for deeper blacks and brighter whites. Using an adjustment layer can be a good idea, since it makes it possible to obtain the desired result by successive trial and error, with no harm done to the original image. The hue and saturation controls will let make subtle color adjustments, until the hue and intensity are just what you want.

Digital photographs: how to make the best of them

While a few years ago, taking photographs would stop for most people when they had pressed the button, with the advent of the digital era, making that same picture is something which can now be seen as a two-step operation: first we take the photograph, which requires a good understanding of the various camera settings; and then comes the editing phase. By using software like Photoshop or The Gimp, we can adjust the contrast, saturation, balance colors, and so on.

And if you want to go by professional standards, you will have to use the raw format. In a few words, using the raw format, means that your camera stores a lot of information, which will be very useful when it comes to adjusting exposure in Photoshop. The raw format is much better in that respect than jpg or TIFF, because there's always a loss of information when editing the latter. It is true that such an amount of information can sometimes seem a bit overkill, when we consider, for instance, that a computer screen can only display a small proportion of all that data: you won't be able to see on the screen of difference between a raw and a tiff format. And since pictures in the raw format are much bigger and use up a lot more resouces, it's wise to stop for a minute and ask yourself what you intend to do with this picture, or this set of pictures, before you take them. Cutting down on memory card expenses, that may be worth a little bit of introspection after all...

Kaneto Shindô - Naked island

Japanese art at its best, or the perfect receipe to create a true work of art with the smallest budget: this movie, which is almost half a century old, could just as well have been shot yesterday. It seems out of time and eternal, utterly imperishable. Shot in black and white, without any dialogues, featuring two unknown actors, it is a masterpiece of crystal purity, haunting and made even more so by the beautiful soundtrack.
Made by Kaneto Shindô while his producers were close to bankruptcy, this movie is like a long hidden treasure which hasn't lost any of its strange and mysterious fascinating power.