Anyway, I have not been active in the local club; when I moved here back in 1989 it was very much a good ol’ Southern boys club. But one of the questioners had identified herself as being on the county executive committee, and asked how they could become more grassroots friendly. So I said what the heck, and at the reception I introduced myself and asked how I could help. Within about ten minutes she had introduced me to several other people and — voila — I’m on the executive committee if I want to be. Which I probably do, although I think I should find out exactly what that involves first.

Who knew it could be that easy to get involved in local politics? Not just stuffing envelopes or precinct walking, although I’m sure I’ll wind up doing that too, but at (at least in a small way) the planning level? I went as a Kossack (and FDLer too) and wham! I’m a member of the Establishment. It turns out that sometimes you don’t have to crash the gate; knock softly and it opens.

By the way, Markos said it hasn’t been announced yet, but YearlyKos is turning into the place to be for Democratic presidential candidates. Feingold can’t be there because the Wisconsin convention is that weekend, but 6 or 8 others (in addition to Warner, who has already said he’s coming) will be there. I didn’t know we had that many, and he didn’t tell me who, but I’m even more excited about going than I was before.

Was my advice to zeppo wrong here?

You’re right, Pach, pixel for pixel exchanges are shallow substitutes for deeper meanings conveyed by voice to ear. Hope you work things out with Valley Girl.

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Cheers!

I can’t wait for the CSI (pick your city)TV show to feature this new technology that can match digital photographs to the cameras that took them.

“But if it can be shown that the original images were taken by the person’s cell phone or camera, it becomes a much stronger case than if you just have a bunch of digital images that we all know are notoriously easy to manipulate.”

Fridrich and two members of her Binghamton University research team – Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan – are coinventors of the new technique, which can also be used to detect forged images.

The three have applied for two patents related to their technique, which provides the most robust strategy for digital image forgery detection to date, even as it improves significantly on the accuracy of other approaches.

Fridrich’s technique is rooted in the discovery by her research group of this simple fact: Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity.

Although these patterns are invisible to the human eye, the unique reference pattern or “fingerprint” of any camera can be electronically extracted by analyzing a number of images taken by a single camera.

That means that as long as examiners have either the camera that took the image or multiple images they know were taken by the same camera, an algorithm developed by Fridrich and her co-inventors to extract and define the camera’s unique pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity can be used to provide important information about the origins and authenticity of a single image.

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And a follow-up posting urging Taylor to podcast. There you go. You’ll be a regular before you know it.

Thanks for the EPU’d Zone plug. It all started here.

Cleaning up the FDL joint after the Late Nite comment crew has left to the latest posting and greener thread meadows is much less hectic than the comment threads all afluff and aflutter with posting piling on posting.

There may be nobody reading this, but every once and awhile the tar-pit that is the EPU’d Zone traps another unwary visitor that I get a chance to chat with.

All in all, worth the trade-offs to me.

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Post away! Have no fear, this project is headed up by Pachacutec who really wants it to work. Your comment can hardly be OT given the resources FDL is putting into it.

It’s also a good thing to steer FDLers toward your diary on kos.

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