Thus spake "Kevin Loch" <kloch@gurunet.net>

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.

In the past, some ISPs have used a quality-reduction algorithm on images to "speed up" dialup users' experience; I assume that's what AOL has adopted. This reminds me of an old saying, "you can make any computation go faster if you don't care if it gives the right answer." S Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin

Yes, AOL has always been know for less than original image quality. But we are often having users getting no image. WIth the images show up as broken images (red x) in their browsers about 30% of the time. "Optimized" is one thing but "optimzed" to oblivion is very painful. Tracerouting to them is very slow while inside their network, altho perhaps due to prioritizing. As far a tampering with the images. Their was a lawsuit in england not long ago over cache engines containing a copy of the image. But I don't remember the outcome. Nicole On 30-Jan-04 Unnamed Administration sources reported Daniel Senie said :

At 07:37 PM 1/29/2004, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

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Thus spake "Kevin Loch" <kloch@gurunet.net>

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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.

In the past, some ISPs have used a quality-reduction algorithm on images to "speed up" dialup users' experience; I assume that's what AOL has adopted.

Gotta use their lingo... your stuff's been optimized!

I have been thinking about whether the use of lossy compression methods would constitute tampering with copyrighted material. After all, if a site was carefully designed to provide optimized images of fine art, and AOL or other ISPs mess with the quality, the value of the site content would be decreased, and the site could lose business due to users thinking the quality of the images is bad.

...

This reminds me of an old saying, "you can make any computation go faster if you don't care if it gives the right answer."

Heh.

|\ __ /| (`\ | o_o |__ ) ) // \\ - nicole@daemontech.com - Powered by FreeBSD - ------------------------------------------------------ " Daemons" will now be known as "spiritual guides" -Politically Correct UNIX Page "Witchcraft is in essence the worship of the powers of this world, beautiful and terrible, but all in a circle under the turning sky that is the One." -C.A. Burland, "Echoes of Magic" "Connecting with energy is something humans have to be open to and talking about and expecting, otherwise the whole human race can go back to pretending that life is about power over others and exploiting the planet. If we go back to doing this, then we won't survive." -James Redfield, "The Celestine Prophecy"

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

I am certainly not trying to make the point that anyone taking part in using web accelerators is violating a copyright by viewing content that is not necessarily in the original form, but I've been witness to a few discussions on several prominent (photo.net, etc) websites where the issue was being raised that the act of the parent company (in this case AOL) collecting images on their proxy and redistributing them to their users (in a new form, recompressed) pretty much negates any digital watermarking present in an image. Am I concerned about it personally? Not at all. Since I shoot primarily 35mm transparency film, I have a physical original of a piece of work, and if I needed to prove an image was really mine, then I would produce the physical copy. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Chris Parker Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 9:16 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown At 09:57 PM 1/29/2004, Benjamin Chase wrote:

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.

Other than AOL, the current batch of dialup accelerators that work through a lossy compression scheme give the user control over image quality ( by providing a 'slider' bar to select preferred quality vs. speed tradeoff ). In addition, they work well with the browser ( IE ) so you can click on an image and get a menu option 'reload at high quality'. Thus you can view the original unaltered image if you want. Additionally, ( again I can't speak for whether AOL does this ), it's very clear to the user what is going on, as there's a program that is installed, that they can turn on or turn off as they wish. As an end-user of dial-up at home, I use a 'web-accelerator' and it does exactly what I want. I can load web pages faster, and if I want to see the high quality original image of the CNN story, I can. Am I violating a copyrighted work if I don't clean my glasses or monitor and thus see an 'altered form' of an image? I don't think so. It is not resent to anyone else in the altered form, and the user viewing the altered form has made a concious decision to view it that way. Alternatively, if the original image is 1600x1200 resolution, and I shrink it to fit on my 1024x768 image in an image viewer, I don't think you could argue I'm transgressing copyright boundries there either. -Chris -- \\\|||/// \ StarNet Inc. \ Chris Parker \ ~ ~ / \ WX *is* Wireless! \ Director, Engineering | @ @ | \ http://www.starnetwx.net \ (847) 963-0116 oOo---(_)---oOo--\------------------------------------------------------ \ Wholesale Internet Services - http://www.megapop.net

At 09:43 PM 1/29/2004, "Brian Bruns" <bruns@2mbit.com> wrote:

Properly implemented watermarking won't be affected by the recompression. It may not be as clear to the program as it would be if it was in its old format, but its still legible.

That's *visible* watermarking, not invisible *digital* watermarking which is hidden in the image file and marks the image as the property of the copyright owner. If AOL's recompression technique is stripping out the digital watermark (can anyone here verify this?), then: AOL is copying and redistributing the image in a new format *without the permission of the copyright holder* in a way that A) makes AOL money and B) removes protections that the copyright holder had placed on the image to help keep third parties from reproducing the image without permission. and in doing so: IMHO they are infringing on the copyright of those who have placed the digital watermark in the image. jc