After several Egyptian secret police buildings were raided recently by protestors, Egyptian blogger Hossam (AKA 3arabawy) stayed awake for two days organizing and uploading photographs of members of Egypt’s secret police who have been accused of brutality and torture. The problem was, Hossam was uploading the images to Flickr, and Flickr wasn’t happy about the fact that he didn’t shoot them. Flickr soon vaporized the photographs and emailed him a warning for copyright violation. Read the rest of this entry »
This audio slideshow interview by BagNewsSalon features New York Times contract photographer Michael Kamber, who discusses the issue of military censorship of photographs shot during the Iraq war and how his ability to document the war became more and more limited as time went on. An interesting point he makes is that uncensored photography should be allowed even if it can’t be published immediately, because it can provide posterity with an accurate view into the past.
Making pictures and getting them published have their own set of rules dictated by government, military, publishers and editors. The images made by the photojournalists who covered the war can reveal a gruesome reality beyond what the American media has shown us. “I think that we need to publish those photos for history even if we can’t get them in the newspaper today,” said Kamber.
A warning: the slideshow includes some pretty intense images of war.
A Venezuelan court ordered newspaper El Nacional not to print violent images after the paper published a controversial image of dead bodies piled up in a Caracas morgue.
The photo, taken by an El Nacional photographer in December, ran with a story last Friday about security problems in the country. On Monday, the image was picked up by another newspaper, Tal Cual.
The Venezuelan government deemed the decision to run the photo as a part of a campaign criticizing current president Hugo Chavez, in light of the upcoming September elections.
The court ordered El Nacional and Tal Cual to not publish violent photos, saying the ruling is to protect children:
“(The print media) should abstain from publishing violent, bloody or grotesque images, whether of crime or not, that in one way or another threaten the moral and psychological state of children.”
El Nacional responded to the ruling on Wednesday by running a front-page story about what they call censorship, along with large blank spaces with “Censored” stamped across where photos usually run. Read the rest of this entry »
It looks like tap tap tap’s Camera+ added one too many features for Apple’s liking. When the app developers tweeted a secret workaround that enabled the volume button to double up to control the shutter, Apple pulled Camera+ from the App Store.
Just this week, developer John Casasanta wrote in a blog post that an upgraded version of the app originally intended to launch the feature, VolumeSnap. VolumeSnap would have also allowed users to use the volume control on iPhone headphones as a remote shutter control. Pretty nifty.
But Apple rejected tap tap tap’s new version, citing this as a reason:
Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7
So tap tap tap left out the feature — at first. The app retained the feature, which was now hidden, but could be enabled by pointing the phone’s browser to a specific site provided by the developers. Read the rest of this entry »
In a move that might spark another Internet debate, Flickr has added India to the list of countries unable to view content rated moderate and/or restricted.
Flickr user crazydude2006 posted a topic to the help forums titled, “i can not see the photos of my contacts.” After a few other users chimed in with their suggestions on how to fix the problem, staff member zyrcster posted the following response:
As you are coming in from a Yahoo! ID in India, and we just localized our site to India, you won’t be able to view moderate or restricted content.
Here’s a screenshot of the thread:
A quick look at the help page for content filters reveals the following updated lines:
Note: If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong, India or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service (this means you won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off). If your Yahoo! ID is based in Germany you are not able to view restricted content due to your local Terms of Service.
Thus, if you’re based in India and noticed recently that you can no longer access certain photographs, now you know why. It likely won’t do much good to complain to Flickr, however, since they need to abide by the laws of each country in order to continue providing their service there.
