geekosystem

There are few things more amusing than anti-piracy advocates being caught, well, pirating. It's the best kind of hypocrisy, if that's a thing. That's the situation Canadian anti-piracy company Canipre found themselves in this week after it was revealed that they totally didn't receive permission to use a bunch of the images associated with their website. Oops.

Instagram rolled out an update today that finally allows users to tag one another in photos. The update is available now for both iOS and Android platforms. Before everyone gets all crazy about privacy concerns, don't worry, there's a grace period where you can opt out of being tagged. There's also a twee pizza party video outlining the new feature.

Full disclosure -- there is very little we like waking up to better than pretty pictures of space. There's just something really soothing about images that are simultaneously extremely gorgeous and throw into stark relief our astonishing insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things -- it just makes us want to crawl right back under the covers in the best possible way. It's in this spirit that we bring you this latest picture from the European Southern Observatory's MPG/ESO telescope -- the best image ever captured of Lupus 3, a star forming cloud some 600 light-years from Earth that you can take a closer look at in the video below.

This amazing photo of the Sun -- taken by astrophotographer John Chumack through a filter that renders it blue, and would probably make a really good tool if you ever needed to defeat Superman -- shows some of the dozens of sunspots that have been flaring up on the surface of the Sun over the past few days. Chumack snapped some pictures through a couple different filters, and you can actually see the sunspots -- which show up as white spots in this image -- more clearly in the photos below. While you're at it, you can get a look at new video -- courtesy of NASA -- that will get you as up close and personal as you can be with the Sun and still not be vaporized. What can we say, we just couldn't resist leading with a bright blue picture of the Sun.

While the above picture may look like an asteroid as seen in an enormous cosmic mirror, it's not -- it's much, much cooler than that. This is the one of the latest images from NASA's Cassini probe, which shows two of Saturns "shepherd moons" -- Pandora and Prometheus, and we swear we're not making that up -- seemingly staring at one another down across the planet's rings.

Instagram is often ridiculed for being an app used most often to share images of meals or natural vistas slapped with a variety of filters. Not everyone's meant to be a gifted photographer, but they can at least take passable pictures. Instagram and Twitter used to be the best of buds, and photos snapped with Instagram were once able to be essentially embedded in tweets. As of now, those days are gone. Instagram has gone and dropped its Twitter card integration.

People love taking them some pictures of food, and there's no more food friendly event than Thanksgiving. It's perhaps no surprise, then, that yesterday's turkey feasts marked the highest of high points for the Instagram, which saw 226 pictures of turkey dinners uploaded to its service every second near it's high point at midday.

Just when you thought it was safe to start trusting people again, Color's gone and officially announced that their photo-sharing app will be shuttered after December 31st, 2012. This is just the latest development in a series of odd twists and turns for the beleaguered startup. In October, rumors began circulating that the startup would be winding down, and then even more rumors emerged that Apple would be acquiring some or all of the company. At the time, Color said that they totally weren't shutting down. Looks like a lot can change in just over a month.

The United Kingdom has some odd rules when it comes to what's considered offensive. Libel laws and the like in the U.K. tend to receive a lot of flak from the Internet, and perhaps there's a perfectly legitimate reason for this. These laws have wacky consequences and serve as another way to stifle free speech more often than not. For example, a man was "arrested on suspicion of malicious telecommunications" this past Sunday. His alleged crime? Posting a photo of a burning poppy to a social network.

By now, you've surely heard about the Kate Middleton topless scandal. Basically, some paparazzi managed to snap a few pictures of the lady relaxing on a terrace with it all hanging loose and then sold those photos to a French tabloid called Closer. Said tabloid was then sued, and a French court has ruled that they must pay a hefty fine of €10,000 -- which comes to about $13,000 -- each time they're republished. Oh, and they also have to turn over the "original" photos or face even more fines. Yeeeeeah.

In its latest update, Google Translate for Android went Goggles, and brought us the ability to translate words from photos. Which makes perfect sense, because if you can't read it, odds are you probably can't type it. Here's how you use it.

Yesterday, some folks were treated to an annular eclipse -- where the Moon passes between the sun and the Earth, but its apparent size is not enough to actually cover the sun entirely. The result is untold numbers of beautiful pictures of a fiery ring in the sky. We've gathered some of the best photos and videos of this astronomical event from around the world. Please see them after the break, won't you?

A new installation at the Amsterdam Foam gallery by Erik Kessels takes a literal look at the digital deluge of photos online by printing out 24 hours worth of uploads to Flickr. The result is rooms filled with over 1,000,000 printed photos, piled up against the walls. There's a sense of waste and a maddening disorganization to it all, both of which are apparently intentional.

The so-called "Polaroid effect" is the darling of many an iPhone photo app. Just by messing with the image's coloring and slapping that iconic white border around it, would-be photographers can give their pictures a vintage hint without the trouble of owning an actual Instamatic-style camera. It's all just innocent fun, though. No one could get hurt...right?

With some dead-simple geolocation trickery, users can see any photos being uploaded with the Color photo sharing app without leaving the comfort of their own home. Chris Wysopal, the chief technology officer with Veracode, announced via Twitter that he had discovered the issue last Thrusday. Here's how it works: Color bills itself as a social photo app, allowing users to see photos being taken by those around them thanks to the GPS data it pulls from the phone. By setting the phone's location data to another position, a user can view the photos being uploaded around a different location. Using an app called FakeLocation installed on an jailbroken iPad, Wysopal changed his tablet's perceived location and then fired up Color. Without a hitch, the photostreams from far away areas loaded up.