Photoshop of Horrors: Wired Readers Show BP How It’s Done

We asked you last week to help us show BP that when hiring unethical photographers (or photo editors) in the future, they should look for Photoshop proficiency on their resumes.

In response, you put the company’s pathetic photo-doctoring of oil-cleanup press photos to shame. Your work was not only more skilled, it was far more imaginative. Why just remove the ground beneath a parked helicopter when you could put that chopper on the moon instead?

As Kanye West would probably tell BP, “Ima let you finish your top kill, but … ”

We’ve got some of the best, most clever and funniest of your work in this gallery, but if you want to see more, including some great ones that were too small to include here, check out the submissions at the bottom of last week’s call for submissions.

Read on…

[Some amazing photos indeed:-)]

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Microsoft, Adobe Deepen Security Ties

At the Black Hat security conference on Wednesday, Microsoft and Adobe announced they were dramatically expanding their relationship in order to better protect users against electronic threats. Now, Adobe will provide vulnerability information about its products via Microsoft’s Active Protections Program (MAPP) to security solution vendors, as does Microsoft. Adobe is the first third party vendor to provide this crucial information, which will help security software makers more rapidly address new threats.

“Given the relative ubiquity of many of our products, Adobe has attracted increasing attention from attackers,” Adobe senior director Brad Arkin said. “We are committed to our customers’ security at every level and are excited to leverage MAPP as an important part of our overall product security initiative. MAPP is a great example of a tried and proven model giving an upper hand to a network of global defenders who all rally behind a shared purpose: protecting our mutual customers.”

Read on…

[I am of the opinion that if some one finds a security issue, he/she should publicize it ASAP. That way everyone can be aware there is a problem and take steps to work around it. This also forces companies to fix the issues rather than sleep over it and take their own sweet time. Hiding a security problem never gets anyone, anywhere.]

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How We Built the Photoshop 20th Anniversary App in Three Days

When Russell Brown of Adobe approached us about doing a Photoshop 20th Anniversary app, we were immediately excited (if you’ve seen Russell’s show, you know that his enthusiasm is what you might call highly infectious). His proposal was to boil the functionality down to the 1990 “Levels” control panel, which he felt was the original soul of Photoshop. The app would load an image from the user’s iPhone photo library, allow multiple changes with live previews, and then let them save the modified image back to their library. In short, it would combine the nostalgia of seeing old-school Photoshop UI running on today’s iPhone with a genuinely useful photo-manipulating function.

However, we had to ship the Corona 1.1 update in early February, with a lot of high-priority features. This pretty much wiped out everyone, and also left very little time for the Photoshop app. To get it done for the anniversary, we had to rely heavily on existing sample code and techniques. Think of it as a reality check at gunpoint: Corona had to be as “quick and easy” for us as our marketing always claims, or the project would flop.

Read on…

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Adobe Download Manager + Web Flaw = Threat

A researcher has unearthed a bug in software used to install Adobe’s ubiquitous Reader and Flash applications that can be exploited to remotely install malicious files on end user PCs.

The Adobe Download Manager is an ActiveX script that is invoked when people install or update Reader or Flash using Internet Explorer. Researcher Aviv Raff has figured out how to exploit it to install any file he wishes simply by tricking a user into clicking on a link on the Adobe.com domain.

Read on…

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Epicenter The Business of Tech Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs

After a big public announcement of the sort Apple had this week for the iPad CEO Steve Jobs often takes time in the day or two afterwards to have a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, making himself available for questions from employees bold enough to stand up and take one right between the eyes.

This time, the big topics included Google and Adobe — no surprises there.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

Read on…

[What Steve says about Flash causing a lot of crashes is bullshit IMO. I have the latest Flash player installed (Shockwave Flash 10.0 r42) and I am still yet to get a crash on my 2 systems running Debian Lenny and Arch Linux. Flash is rock stable. Also, the world might be moving to HTML 5 for video, but games will still be written in Flash, Steve.]

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