AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown

Fri Jan 30 03:57:13 UTC 2004

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 at 2mbit.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:49 PM
To: Kevin Loch
Cc: nanog at 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 at merit.edu
Precedence: bulk
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing at 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 at 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