The Null Device

This is pretty cool: a researcher at Adobe has developed software for manipulating moving objects in video in real time. The software works by tracking points and assigning them to objects, and as the demo shows, allows, among other things, moving objects to be automatically "graffitied" with text or annotated with automatically moving speech/thought bubbles. It also maps the degrees of freedom of a point in an object, and by clicking and dragging on it, automatically moves the video to a frame which has that point going in the desired direction, allowing video to be "scrubbed" by dragging moving objects. He even has it compositing frames of video with different objects (people, in this case) at different positions.

(via Engadget) ¶ adobe cs nifty research video 0

Ominous tidings: Riot police shoot dead a demonstrator at anti-globalisation protests; the officers will probably be charged, but who gave the orders to shoot to kill? Meanwhile, a Russian programmer is in jail for revealing the secrets of Adobe's access controls (a crime under the DMCA), and hence Alan Cox has resigned from the USENIX committee in protest. Whether this will make a point or marginalise the penguinhead pirasite colony remains to be determined. Meanwhile, the US Government has created a special elite cyber-cop agency of highly-trained aspheads to hunt down intellectual property thieves, crackers, copyright violators and other enemies of capitalism (and that means you, hiding there with the DeCSS source and the eight gig of MP3s on your hard disk; don't think they cannot see you), further escalating the War On Copying.

¶ adobe alan cox copyfight copyright drm globalisation pdf protest 0