I'm quite surprised that many professional photographers haven't spoken out against this, as a few issues arise as a result of this: 1 - Potential sales MAY be lost as a result of the degradation of quality. 2 - Ineffective digital watermarking. One could make the argument that since AOL has such a large share of the online market, that by deliberately modifying imagery (especially commercial) in such a way, they are doing a disservice to sites that are very reliant on the quality of their imagery. (Getty, Corbis, etc.) An issue could also be raised about storing and reproducing (via proxy and ART compression) a copyrighted work without explicit permission. Ben Chase Federal Contractor (and photographer) - Spokane, WA -----Original Message----- From: Brian Bruns [mailto:bruns@2mbit.com] Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:49 PM To: Kevin Loch Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown autolearn=ham version=2.63 X-Spam-Report: * -4.9 BAYES_00 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 0 to 1% * [score: 0.0000] * -100 USER_IN_WHITELIST From: address is in the user's white-list X-SA-Exim-Version: 3.1 (built Tue Oct 14 21:11:59 EST 2003) Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu Precedence: bulk Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu X-Loop: nanog X-Scrubber-ClamAV: clean MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Thursday, January 29, 2004 7:14 PM [GMT-5=EST], Kevin Loch <kloch@gurunet.net> wrote:
Nicole wrote:
In the past few days our AOL users have been reporting serious problems
Several Brickshelf users have complained about the new "blurry images" problem using AOL. I have not heard any reports of broken images or upload problems yet.
Kevin Loch I
This is more of their AOL TopSpeed stuff. Basically, the reason why end users are seeing the blurry images is because of the AOL ART format being used by their web proxies. Downloaded images via the built in web browser are actually not in the same format as they were on the server. Basically, AOL's proxies download the image, recompress it as an ART image (killing a good portion of the quality in photos especially) and forwards it to the built in IE browser which knows how to render the ART images (even though the images themselves are still called .gif and .jpg and similar). Want to see an example of this? In older AOL versions (before 7 IIRC), load up a photo in the built in IE browser in AOL with image compression on, right click and save the image to disk, then try to open it with third party image program such as GIMP or PaintShop Pro and watch it moan about the format not being right. The sudden decrease in quality could be because they turned up the compression level. -- Brian Bruns The Summit Open Source Development Group Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources http://www.sosdg.org The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org