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The malware, called Antinny, finds random files on Winny users' PCs and makes them available on the file-sharing network. So far, the data leaked have been varied and plentiful: passwords for restricted areas at airports, police investigations, customer information, sales reports, staff lists.

The constantly updated virus seems to have spared no one — airlines, local police forces, mobile phone companies, the National Defense Agency. Even an antivirus software manufacturer has suffered.

Who in their right mind would put file-sharing software on the same machine that has secret investigation documents?

I love Digg, but it's depressing how frequently readers get off topic. Digg thought this was saying hip-hop made the beat famous, and digressed into a discussion of the authenticity of hip-hop versus the artistry that came before.

Even the blurb calls this a "video" missing the point that you're listening to an acetate, a transient pressing of an original work likely to last only about 50 plays in the analog world.

If you're interested in his "point", skip to 14:45, and listen to something often discussed on Digg but rarely illustrated so artistically.

Well, 1's and 0's in notepad do not binary make. So, for the community at large, here's something that's actually helpful.

Naysayers are asking, "What's the business model?"

• Chants and Petroglyphs : music and art
• Flints and Clay : technology foundations, hardware, and software
• Pitfalls and Snares : quality assurance, security, bugs
• Seashells and Beads : markets and finance
• The Kilns : corporations or individuals behind technologies
  
• The Potshards : gadgets, products, end results of companies using tools with funding from markets to make nice things
• With Talking Stick : our turn to "opinionate"...

In two-factor authentication, customers must confirm their identities not only through something they know, like a PIN or password, but also with something they physically have, like a hardware token with numeric access codes that change every minute.

Following my comment with this remark gives the impression I think film cameras are nasty. On the contrary, my post (suggesting reasons digital sensors may not yet capture reality effectively) doesn't suggest Bresson should not use film. Nor am I suggesting digital sensors are not effective.

My theme here is that the interaction of reality, photons, and the biology of our brains, cannot be represented by megapixels alone. Something else is needed, something elusive, and hopefully this is what top end manufacturers are working on now.

My earlier lengthier posts comment on why analog representations (such as film) may seem to do a better job capturing reality than comparably sized digital sensors. Eg., skim my earlier post on stochastic placement of film grain versus grids of pixels. And don't forget, film makers are enjoying advancements in technology too, for example, Fuji's "nano placement" of flim grain:

http://www.fujifilm.ca/... ...icle.asp?ParentID=7&SectionID=85&NewsroomID=137

Something to note when thinking about film vs digital in the movie world: digital film will sense the same pixel value over and over for each frame, while movie film with chaotic grain will capture an always slightly different rendering of the scene. Run those chaotically different renderings through playback, and our brains compile them into a complexity far beyond what may be represented by any individual frame. Unfortunately, this idea doesn't help the print photographer, but it is why hollywood can get away with cheap 35mm color film projected onto a 100 foot screen.

Have a look at the reviews for various image sharpening tools, and how they struggle to deal with the problems that arise when an "edge" (such as the line between a watch's black hands and the watch's white face) falls in the center of a pixel.

Most of us can certainly see the difference between RGB(255,255,255) and RGB(255,255,254). Those differences cause "banding". Look at The Luminous Landscape's excellent review of Kodak's monochrome professional camera (the 760m, if I recall). 12-bit color is better than 8-bit, but it's not enough. Neither is 16-bit color.

There's a difference between "precision" and equations. An equation can define the number "pi", but no amount of decmial precision can define it accurately.

JPEGs look blocky because their cosine formulae cannot capture the rich subtleties of the real world. Fractal images formats are somewhat better, because the equations they use to compress data can represent more of the chaos detail inherent in reality.

DPReview uses photographs of a watch face to illustrate advances in photographic sensors. Look closely, and the loss of information due to "precision" is always apparent. Find a real watch face, and study the edge of one of the hands. Examine with a magnifying glass the shadow that slender hand casts on the face. No matter how closely you look, you will not see pixels, or banding, or differences in shades of color. Put the same scene under ever increasing powers of magnification, and you will unveil ever richer amounts of detail.

This is not to say that computers will never capture and render reality. Far from it. Ray Kurzweil writes, in his book "The Singularity is Near", that computers may become smarter than humans, and in fact may completely model and emulate the human mind, in the next 30 years.

But virtual reality won't be achieved through precision. It will be reached by understanding and interpreting the "rules" of how reality appears to our mind through our senses, and modelling that ever more closely.

You can recognize a friend from a single line describing her profile drawn by a sketch artist. MIT has demonstrated we can recognize age, gender, mood, and even individuals, if we are shown only 13 points on that individual's body in motion as they walk (dots at the shoulders, elbows, hands, hips, knees, and feet, and one more for the head).

The endeavour to capture and convey reality with an imperfect abstract sounds to me like "art". I hope this art is Nikon's goal, not some quixotic quest for megapixel precision.

For an example outside of photography, compare any state of the art video game (say, "Far Cry") on the best state of the art video card* (say, Nvidia or ATI) on a 19" LCD, with an S-VHS tape of an old TV food commercial (say, a mid-eighties salad dressing ad showing glistening water drops on lettuce and tomatoes) on a <20" TV, and which one looks more lifelike?

The analog TV resolution is comparable to 320x240 (VHS, 0.08 megapixels) or 720x480 (DVD, 0.35 megapixels) but looks far better than a game with 1600x1200 (2 megapixels). The difference is the fuzzy (organic?) edges and analog color curves. Kind of like good bokeh. :-)

Anyway, this is why I like the Nikon D2X vs the Canon 1DS MII. Nikon's smaller sensors have noise in the grey, instead of the noise Canon has in the color channels. Canon certainly has less noise, mathematically, but to my eye, the Nikon luminance noise scattered across smaller sensors looks more like film grain than the chroma noise.

Another example of this is in color printing technology for printing presses. "Lines per inch" term comes from halftone screening, which under a loupe looks like newsprint photos seen with naked eye. I worked in printing industry in late 80's, and "stochastic" printing got a lot of attention then. The idea was that instead of halftone screens with dots following a grid, you'd use a random placement of dots to better approximate the real world colors. It worked, and looked fantastic, but was very hard to control. Here's an article about that:

The interaction between camera and lens isn't just about math. Looking at Nikon's 4MP from a D2Hs compared to 6-8MP from other vendors, looking at Nikon's 105 portrait lens that allows you to adjust the appearance of out-of-focus objects, I think Nikon "gets it". I think they're actually trying to look less digital, not win a MP race. And if they offer new glass for the D2X or future D sensors, I'll be first in line if it's about capturing an analog world more aesthetically, not an oscilloscope metric of resolution.

* Footnote: All video cards for the past decade have offered "anti-aliasing" which manufacturers say eliminates the jaggies aka the digital look. But look closer, because the AA is only operating on edges within solid shapes (smoothing the curves approximated by polygons on a car or torso) and not between the shapes and the background (compare edge of car to background, it's still jaggy). Next generation cards are supposed to be able to AA between foreground shapes and the background. Supposedly the XBOX 360 can do that, for example. This may finally close the gap between 1950's technology TV and 2005's video games. It's not the megapixels, it's what you do with them to make them look more lifelike.

** Originally posted at DPReview.com at 11:11 PM, Friday, October 14, 2005 (GMT-5)