Homegrown Star Wars, with big-screen magic intact

Like many amateur filmmakers, Felux ultimately hopes Hollywood, or even Lucas himself, is watching. But he’s part of a broader online culture in which big-screen commercial works are grist for a small-screen creative mill, and the onetime audience is taking over the tools of production.

The movie site

Or can we expect Nikon to show more sense? Naaaaah!: Nikon’s photo encryption reported broken

Because Nikon scrambled a portion of the file, legal worries have kept third-party developers like Adobe Systems from supporting Nikon’s uncompressed “raw” photos in their software. Nikon sells its Nikon Capture utility for $100.

“It’s an open format now,” said programmer Dave Coffin, who posted the decryption code on his Web site this week. “I broke that encryption–I reverse-engineered it.”

His site: Raw Digital Photo Decoding in Linux — see also Image Preservation Through Open Documentation on the formation of OpenRAW