Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Live from the Honolulu International Airport, I bring you the following conversation I shared with the Transport Security Administration about the photography of their checkpoint.

Me: Is there any specific written tsa regulation prohibiting photography?

TSA Captain: Yes there is. Phography is not allowed.

Me: Can I see this in writing?

TSA Captain: I can’t let you see that.

Me: Then how do I know it exists?

TSA Captain: I just told you.

Obviously there is a problem here; I don’t mind not being able to take photos (national security, yada yada) but TSA as a government agency has to at least inform the public of its regulations. How can anyone be held responsible for violating a regulation they could not possibly know exists.

I like the idea behind Pirate Bay’s new image hosting venture Bay Image, which is free, unrestricted image hosting outside of political influence or police control. I like the idea that visual information can find a free home. However, they have a big problem at the moment, which is the massive amounts of porn being uploaded. Just take a look at their tag cloud and it becomes clear what BayImg really is: a free porn hosting site:

They have a “report image” link, but according to their terms on the front page, these kind of images are probably ok:

Bayimg is a place where you can host all your images. We do not censor them. We believe in freedom of speech, it’s of utter importance to us. As long as your pictures are legal they will be hosted here, but we reserve the right to remove images due to technical reasons though.

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This photo is a combination of an HDR photo taken of a moving object, so there are two images of the man and his dog. I think it’s a neat effect, like he’s walking with his ghost:

Snapped this in HDR, it came out pretty nicely:

After late night fun with hydrogen peroxide bleaching kits, I ended up looking like this:

No laughing, please!