Can you, without a shadow of doubt, tell which of these photos are taken by a professional photographer?  The answer is near the middle of the page, but please don't cheat.

Recently I had a confrontation with the photolab manager, cashier, and department manager over whether or not I could purchase copies of some photos because the cashier "thought" they looked professional.  After 20 minutes of heated debate on my part the Walmart staff decided I could not have the pictures I had just printed myself on their self service machine.  The conversation started when the employee in the photolab there, who was also  checking out my order, said he needed to see my photos before he could sell them to me.  I asked why, since I showed him the slip with the price that the machine printed out with the price clearly stated on it.  Since I printed them myself I saw no further need for him to inspect anything.  After showing him the prints he explained that he could not ring me up for them since they were obviously professionally taken.  I asked him how he knew they were professionally taken since they did not have any studio name, photographer name, or any copyright information whatsoever on them.  His explaination was that they simply "looked" professionally taken and that was enough.  With this, my dismay over the issue, and my further escalation of anger and volume several others became involved.  I later apologized for my loss of temper, asked their forgiveness and thanked them that there were at least people with the conscience to do right in this day in age.  Suprisingly, they forgave me and I went about my business.

The point is this.  Can a person with no real photography training such as the above people who understand nothing about how a copy negative or professional print really qualify to judge whether or not my pictures were indeed professionally taken?  Well, they don't need to since the burden of proof for a picture with no markings whatsover was on me.  But how can you prove ownership in such cases?  You can't.

The only reason I bring this up is this is where we seem to be headed with copyright issues and as a photographer this issue affected me personally.  If all labs take this stand how is a person to verify ownership of his own photos?  After all, will owning the original negatives mean anything in such a case.  Unless they are viewed in the eye of a real professional who has done copy work then can the person running a lab be qualified to tell the difference between a copy negative and a original photo?  How much more difficult will proof be with digital where there isn't even physical proof by having a negative at all, and Exif information on raw and jpeg photos can be forged and changed.

If every lab worker becomes the "copyright police" how can we defend ourselves? What if one day I take my negatives into a photolab to prove my copies are owned by me and the person decides he will confiscate them and all of my original photos until the police comes to arrest me? What kind of problem will any amatuer  photographer run into when he sends his photos out for printing to a lab far away?

For now, most copy places only question copies of documents, photos and prints if they are printed by them, not self service.  Is this a sign of the changes to come where every document of any type is inspected by non-qualified people?  Oh, I almost forgot, picures 2,3,5 and 6 were definitely taken by me and I am not a professional photographer.  Pictures 1,4 and 7 I am not sure about but and may have been taken by my grandfather.  Picture number 4 has a number that looks like a type of file system number written on it.  These three pictures are of my mom when she was 7, 14 and 19 years of age.  I am 56 and she died at the age of 56 in 1989 which, if my math is correct, makes the photos between 71- 59 years old.  None of the photos have studio or photographer ownership markings of any kind since largely in that day in age the photo was considered the final product, and if you owned the photo, you owned the rights to it.  These were the three photos I took to Walmart and which they refused to let me have the copies I made.

To my knowledge, copyright issues in the past largely depend on someone who feels their copyright has been infringed on making it a legal issue.  Because of the movie and music industries' power, copyright is becoming "policed" more and more.  In other words, even though there have been very few actual cases if any of photographers taken customers to court over their photos being copied, Walmart feels, at least in my case, that they can give this over run authority to it's people to decide and police it.  I only bring this up because it is a move from waiting for someone's rights being violated to actually "hunting" for violations.  I hope you can see the difference as the definitions of law goes through what is termed "the evolution of law."  It is the difference of the change in the meaning of the term "unreasonable search and seizure" as termed in our Consitution.  I suppose this was the very issue to begin with at the store.  I felt like my personal rights had been violated and of course I am sure the store would defend itself by saying I agreed to their photo policy, which I did.  But what gave them the right to decide I might have violated some law that they needed to search and seize the copies?  Can you see where I am coming from.  It's a lot like TSA searching you at the airport, or police stopping you at a drinking check point to make sure you haven't been drinking, or drug test being allowed in the work place (don't discount the fact that you haven't broken any law to start with), and all these have now been accepted into our society, when in the past we would have considered them unreasonable search and seizure.  See what I mean?

The coming of the new year will signify the demise of the Compact Disc.  Yes, you heard me right.  The music industry plans to kill off the CD sometime in 2012.  This was surprising to me as they have yet to kill off record albums which have existed since their inception and are less popular than CD's.  Evidently, people are just becoming too interested in music downloads, (Mp3 and such), and cd sales have dropped off.  I'ts hard to understand their thinking from my point of view.  The disc, which they probably pay pennies to produce, are not that unpopular and still hold quite a market.  It does however, not stand a chance against music downloads which cost almost nothing to reproduce and can be reproduced at a higher rate, can be digitally rights managed, (which cd's cannot), and have no packaging or package contents.  With downloads, shipping is not a cost factor either and companies can buy cheap computers that can spit out thousands of copies of songs by the hour with almost no human envolvement.  See the big picture?

Unfortunately what this usually means is lower quality and limited use from a consumer's perspective.  If paying for downloads becomes the exclusive future of music, then you can expect more control over what you listen to under digital rights management and cheaper sound quality, without cd's being a competitive player.  I can only lament the loss of the true audiophile who enjoyed simple yet clear stereo sound, and to my taste's, cd filled that need.  Don't get me wrong.  I love the wonderful quality of dvd audio and other hi-end surround sound, but already much of the music I grew up with is out of print and will probably never be in print again.  With the demise of the cd the chance of getting that stuff is getting even slimmer.  So with this post I want to praise the format I loved so much as well as lament it's loss by mentioning the time I first heard about CD's and my first experience with the format.

I can remember the first time I heard about compact disc.  I read it in a magazine and it sounded like the answer to all of my problems with static, noise, pops, and clicks when listening to albums. Cassette tapes were ok too, if you copied it yourself, but most of the mass produced copies were still full of hiss, bad highs, lows, or midrange or just over-modulated, and few companies were taking full advantage of it's capabilities.  Tapes made using the cheapest tape stock with the lowest quality plastic housings were the norm and sometimes these tapes didn't even play a week or so after buying them because they would bind and jam or the tape would deteriorate leaving oxide residue on tape heads causing constant cleaning.

Shortly after hearing about the new cd format I was in a music store in Dover Delaware in a sound room listening to a record album play on an expensive 1000.00 turntable hooked up to a Yamaha sound system.  I was drooling over how great the record sounded when one of the sales people who was in the room mentioned he had a copy on compact disc of the same album I was listening to.  I asked if it could sound that much different on cd?  He put the disc on but all I heard was silence.  Was something wrong?  No, it was just the lack of turntable and record noise I was used to at the beginning of playing a record.  Then the music started and it sounded like the orchestra was in the same room, only with no scratches, pops, clicks, or noise between tracks, and with much better range.  When he showed me the disc I was amazed so much sound came a disc about 1/6 the size of a record.  He told me it was more durable than a record too since nothing touched the disc surface when playing.  He then did something you would never do with a record.  He threw it on the floor, picked it up, wiped it off with his sleeve, and played it again in the cd player.  It played perfectly with no skips or clicks.  Needless to say, I wanted a cd player from that moment on, even though I recall there were probably only 5 cd compilations available in the U.S. at the time.

Some time later I purchased a cd player for about $80.00, (a bit of money back then), and my first disc.  It was a disc from Radio Shack and cost me around $10.00.  I still have that first disc and it still plays perfectly the same as the day I bought it.  I read so many complaints about how the sound of a compact disc isn't as good as an album.    Of course most of my discs are only 16 bit mastering instead of 24, but I will take a cd over a record album any day.  I have a good turntable and a reasonably good cartridge for it.  Even with the best record cleaners you still have to put the album away and go through the cleaning process over and over everytime you listen to it.  No matter how careful you are you will eventually get that scratch you are trying to avoid.  Besides this, the more you play it the more wear it gets.  You can of course record your albums and have a really great cleaning system, (and I do), but you still have that maintenance and care and you will never get away from it.






































As with records, this probably won't end the use of the cd by all companies that use it.  It most likely will affect only the big hitters like Warner, Sony, and the major labels.  Smaller companies will probably still use cd's until at some point it may just become a fad like the revival of LP record albums and 45's from companies like “oldies.com.”  In any case, I will still buy them until I can no longer get a drive to play them in.

Recently someone from the outside tried to access our wifi using something that my wife downloaded.  At least, that's how it appeared.  My wife's computer began running really slow and funny things began happening to her desktop, (mouse began moving on it's own, icons flickered).  It appeared to be that someone was trying to remotely control her computer.  I quickly checked our wifi log and found this information repeated several times.

[DoS attack: STORM] attack packets in last 20 sec from ip [199.79.170.214], Saturday, Nov 12,2011 13:11:47

[LAN access from remote] from 71.93.84.50:65342 Saturday, Nov 12,2011 08:10:41

[LAN access from remote] from 71.93.84.50:65336 Saturday, Nov 12,2011 08:10:41

While I had set up some security using "WPA2," I had not set up all of it, (not understanding what I was doing).  I instantly shut down the sending portion, (ie. the radio transmitter), and began working on the rest of the security.  Granted, nothing will prevent the hardest wifi stealer from accessing your network if he/she really wants to, but seeing what can be done by those who try made me realize I needed to know more about how to prevent it.  Below is a list of things I found and I hope will help you too.  Note, none of the below steps is guaranteed to prevent someone from breaking into your network, but combined they will make it difficult and will cause most network stealers to give up.  While this is not an exhaustive list or a "how-to," I hope it will give you some guidance as to what steps you can take.

1.  HIDE THE NETWORK NAME- routers display the network name to others called "SIS Broadcasting."  Routers usually allow you to turn it off.

2.  CHOOSE WPA2 ENCRYPTION (128bit)- if at all possible instead of WEP.  Most newer computers can connect using WPA2.  For now, this is the most secure encryption possible.

3.  CHOOSE AES TYPE OF ENCRYPTION-  TKIP is more easily cracked.  In most cases, WPA2 is set to AES 128 bit Encryption.

4.  USE IP RANGES-  Computers connect using IP addresses.  In most routers you can choose specific ranges for the IP addresses.  An example would be a range of 1.92.168.1.25 to 192.168.30.  In this example using this range, your router will only accept a range of 5 different IP addresses between the ranges shown above.  That way someone outside of that range cannot connect.  If nothing else, this will kick anyone off your wifi if the computers on your network are using all of the addresses at any given time.  The downside of this is someone can scan your wifi until it finds an opening and change their IP to match.

5.  USE IP ADDRESS RESERVATION-  Most newer routers will allow you to assign a specific address to a specific computer's "MAC" address.  This is a complementary step to the above advice.  If you assign a specific IP address to a specific MAC, then someone cannot connect to the router even if they have the same IP as one of your own computers because they don't also have the same MAC address as yours.  The downside is someone can scan for MAC addresses, (technically speaking, that is) however difficult this may be and rare.  Nevertheless, this step will add another layer of defense.

6.  CHOOSE THE LONGEST PASSWORD POSSIBLE- with characters made up of letters, numbers and symbols (if the router will accept symbols), and use random characters, not words.

7.  DON'T TURN ON REMOTE ACCESS IF YOU DON'T NEED IT- Remote access allows you to access your internet from another source like a coffee shop or a friends wifi.  If you can do without it, don't turn on remote access, (that is, don't allow your router to be accessed by you from a remote location).  Downside, someone who actually hacks your router can turn this on making it accessable from another network outside your own if you don't catch it.

8.  DON'T ALLOW PORT FORWARDING IF YOU DON'T NEED IT-  Again, there is a very remote chance someone can access your router through an open port, but why allow it if you don't need it?  Port forwarding allows someone, either you or another, a direct route to your router through that port through the use of port scanning capabilities.  In otherwords, access through that port is less protected because it is like a open door through your firewall.

9.  USE PORT SCAN, DoS, AND NAT FILTERING PROTECTION-  Make sure Port Scan, DoS Protection, and Nat Filtering are all turned on.  These are firewall type protections built into the router and generally don't need any kind of configuration other than check box in your configuration window.

10.  TURN ON LOGGING-  You won't know if something is going on unless you view logs.  Also, it may be helpful as proof, howbeit small, should someone tap into you wifi and do illegal activity through it and it become a legal issue, (if you find a problem you can copy and backup the log contents).

11.  GIVE UNIQUE NAMES TO ALL THE COMPUTERS ON YOUR NETWORK-  Your wifi will read the name given to your computers.  Most people never change their computer name.  Most the time it is set to some factory name like "HP Computer," or similar.  I gave all of my computers on my network names like "NCP-LTP," (combination of my son's initials and abbreviation of the word "laptop").  When I look at who is connected to my network I can instantly see if he is connected by the use of that name and he is using his laptop, not a PC.  You can change the computer name in windows by going to "control panel," then "system," and clicking on the "advanced" tab.  If this does not work a quick search on the internet for "change computer name in windows" will help.

12.  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DOWNLOAD-  With all of this security in place, nothing will stop someone from hacking if you click on a site or download a program that allows them to hack your computer from the inside for all the info they need to bypass all of it and punching through your router's firewall.

13. BACKUP UP ROUTER SETTINGS FREQUENTLY- Backup your settings to a place safe.  This will make it easy if you have to reset your router settings to factory default. Along with this, make sure you save both the original password and the passwords you create so you can easily access them again.


Though not directly related to your router's secuity, these added secure measures for your computer will help protect you if someone does break into your system and try to attack your computer.


MAKE SURE ALL OF YOUR VIRUS & SPYWARE PROTECTION IS IN PLACE-  If you use Windows, (as opposed to linux or BSD), then make sure your own computer's firewall and spyware, adware, and virus protection are all in place.

LEARN HOW TO USE A DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEM, (LINUX OR BSD).  These are far more secure than windows

LEARN HOW TO USE OTHER SECURITY MEASURES-  These are other security measures I would recommend and they are free.

• Keepass and KeepassX-  These are two secure password storage programs that are somehow related and almost identical in looks and function.  You can store all of your passwords in either program using AES 256 bit encryption.  I store all of my router information including MAC addresses, IP configurations, router passwords, and internet provider info in keepassX because it is easier to install on Linux.  Keepass and KeepassX are available in Windows, MAC, and Linux versions.  If you are simply installing on Windows use the Keepass.exe file available here.  KeepassX is a little more complicated to install on Windows but if you prefer it then you can be find it here.

• Truecrypt- Another free utility which creates secure containers, (similar to folders), for securely storing documents or files of any type. Truecrypt can be found here.

• Add An "S" at the end of the "http-" Add an "s" to the end of http when going to a bank or other secure site.  This will encrypt your personal information sent from the very beginning of your session with that site.  Not all sites will allow this but almost all banks, credit cards, and other sites do.  Better yet, if you use "Firefox" browser, there is a extension called "HTTPS-everywhere.  It automatically checks to see which sites use secure and which don't and sets it for "https" for those that do.

• Copy And Paste Your Passwords- A final measure I would recommend is to not type your passwords when going to bank accounts or other sites over the internet.  Instead, copy and paste them to prevent little programs someone else can embed onto your computer called keyloggers from storing the typed password and transmitting it back to a hacker.

Given enough time and having the right tools anyone can break into a network.  The best option is to make it as difficult as possible and to look out for "funny" things going on.  In my case, I hope whoever it was trying to break into my internet gave up because it was too difficult.  Most will give up if they are just trying to play around or just looking for a free network to use.  There is always the chance someone is trying to break in because of the challenge of doing so or hoping to get some serious information.  For this reason, it pays to make it as difficult as possible.