After several months of tests and experiments, I have finally determined something: Infrared with the Lumix DMC-FZ8 just doesn’t work.
I’ve been trying to use a R72 Near-Infrared filter to filter out the “normal” light that we see, leaving only the infrared light that I wanted to capture. The FZ8 is sensitive to infrared, as can be easily demonstrated by taking a picture of a TV remote control. What you’ll see is a couple of points of light coming from the remote; these are the infrared lights that are used to transmit commands to the TV.
Though having a camera that is sensitive to infrared, doesn’t make it suited for infrared photography. While the FZ8 is a great camera, being light weight, offering pro-level options (such as RAW mode) without the bulk of a DSLR – this is one thing that just doesn’t work.
Here are a few of the issues I’ve seen, and so far been unable to get passed:
- Auto-Focus: While this isn’t a huge surprise, autofocus doesn’t work when the R72 filter is in place.
- Manual-Focus: The FZ8 does offer manual focus, though using it when there is so little light making it to the sensor is nearly impossible.
- Grainy: Even when ISO is set to 100 instead of the default of auto, the images are extremely grainy. While this can provide a somewhat artistic effect – it’s not what I’m looking for.
While it does seem to have some promise in replicating an infrared version of pinhole photography, it simply doesn’t work for traditional infrared.
It’s been some time since I last wrote about YAWAST on here, it was actually back in April when I posted the last update – that was for the release of YAWAST v0.7.0. Currently, it’s at version 0.11.0 and a lot has changed. It’s been rewritten from scratch, more people have become involved, it has moved to a (fairly) regular release cycle, and has expanded a fair bit in terms of functionality.
It has now been over a year since the last major release of YAWAST, but today I am happy to release version 0.7, which is one of the largest changes to date. This is the result of substantial effort to ensure that YAWAST continues to be useful in the future, and add as much value as possible to those performing security testing of web applications.
If you are using the Gem version, simply run gem update yawast to get the latest version.
The Bitcoin community has changed greatly over the years; from technophiles that could explain a Merkle tree in their sleep, to speculators driven by the desire for a quick profit & blockchain startups seeking billion dollar valuations led by people who don’t even know what a Merkle tree is. As the years have gone on, a zealotry has been building around Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies driven by people who see them as something far grander than they actually are; people who believe that normal (or fiat) currencies are becoming a thing of the past, and the cryptocurrencies will fundamentally change the world’s economy.
The information security industry, and more significantly, the hacking community are prolific producers of incredibly valuable research; yet much of it is lost to most of those that need to see it. Unlike academic research which is typically published in journals (with varying degrees of openness), most research conducted within the community is presented at a conference – and occasionally with an accompanying blog post. There is no journal, no central source that this knowledge goes to; if you aren’t at the right conference, or follow the right people on Twitter, there’s a great chance you’ll never know it happened.
Huge PGP files, an ancient version of PGP, and errors every time they tried to decrypt a file – that was my completely unexpected challenge on Friday. Dealing with file processing issues really isn’t part of my job description, but I’m the closest thing my company has to an expert when it comes to encryption, so the task fell to me.
After looking at the options and issues to get the server upgraded to a non-stone-age version of the PGP software, the easiest answer looked like decrypting the files with GPG – it wasn’t as easy as expected, but I did get some useful information that may help others.
