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Putin on the Ritz

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31–40 of 92 posts

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#31
What never cease to amaze me is how secret services around the globe waste so much time on trivial things like that.

I read somewhere that the US president always traveled with its own toilets in fear of spies analyzing his "production" oO

Meanwhile people are still dying of hunger ...

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#32

Haha, the modified photo appeared in a satirical post on Index.hu, there's nothing to see here people, move on. :) http://index.hu/szarvas/2014/02/11/ader_alair/ Here're the other posts from the same series: http://index.hu/szarvas/ All entries are simple montages, they're only funny for people who know Hungarian politics, but for them they're quite obvious. Edit: the man in the middle of the photo is the Hungarian P…

So a bit like someone reading The Onion and not knowing it's fake? :)

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#33
Trust is something hard to come by and when dealing with foreign sources you have to rely on translators and their issues. What is worse, even if the translators are reliable, alterations can be made after the fact, but verification is difficult because of language barriers.

Here is an example that my father found about Putin's person of the year interview with Time. Time published a full transcript [1] in English and Kremlin published the full transcript [2] in Russian. The very first question is different! Kremlin's version includes a question where the reported bungled the Putin's birthday and though he was born in 1946 instead of 1952, but Time omits it. It wasn't a very substantive question, but it did set the tone for the interview and the difference is upsetting. As far as I know this particular issue has not been widely discussed for the past 7 years.

If media and/or governments alter the smallest records for reasons of incompetence, what do they do to hide larger errors?

[1] http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/a... [2] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=ht...

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#34
post #2

The main angle of the post (dressing exactly the same all the time) is a very interesting one, but the end points are somewhat scary. Think of it: if it's so easy to fake color photos so that people won't notice, isn't it easier to fake black&white photos? How do you know this is real: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Yalta_Con... ? I don't. If we routinely don't trust colour pictures in newspapers,…

We could rewrite the history for next generation and no one would likely notice it.

Nearly all tellings of history have a bias, and people nearly always mistell history, espeically history about their tribe/country/ethnicity/country. This is nothing new.

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#36
post #32

Haha, the modified photo appeared in a satirical post on Index.hu, there's nothing to see here people, move on. :) http://index.hu/szarvas/2014/02/11/ader_alair/ Here're the other posts from the same series: http://index.hu/szarvas/ All entries are simple montages, they're only funny for people who know Hungarian politics, but for them they're quite obvious. Edit: the man in the middle of the photo is the Hungarian P…

So a bit like someone reading The Onion and not knowing it's fake? :)

It's a bit like being a well-known expert in finance, reading The Onion, and writing a post on your personal blog on ft.com on why the government should not dump dollars into the giant money hole. :D

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#38
post #20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've reached a point in time when we can start actually faking history. It has always been possible to fake history, inadvertently or intentionally. There was a narrow stretch of time when photography became widespread which made it a bit harder to fake history, but photographs were being faked and staged long before we had computers to do digital editing of them. And before we had photographs, it was possible to…

There is an interesting thoery called Phantom Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis related to a preiod in the middle ages that may not have existed. supposedly a king wanted to be on the throne during the millennium so faked a few hundred years of history. If true we would only be in the 17th or 18th century. Which may explain why the world didn't end in 2012, or why there still aren't hover boar…

There's a theory that the lizard people actually control human brains from within their secret lair in the centre of the world too.

Europeans weren't the only ones with calendars and keeping time, y'know. Our current calendar matches up with other calendaers.

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#39
post #23

` PCA measures JPEG artifacts.` Just for some clarification - how does that work, exactly? If you decompose an image using PCA/SVD and find a cliff in the spectrum, is that a fingerprint of JPEG compression?

The name doesn't ring a bell, but judging by the pic its this stuff:

http://29a.ch/2012/4/15/image-error-level-analysis-with-html...

Re: Putin on the Ritz

#40
post #15

Huh, I live in Russia and I never noticed that Putin always wears the same clothes. Fascinating. I certainly wouldn't put using Communist-era photo-op tactics past him.

Putin admires the USSR and used to be part of the KGB. More likely than unlikely!
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