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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Spokane Public Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In
computer news this week
4/18/2012 On the web, what you see is what you can get … Or to put it in a Field of
dreams context – if you display it – they will come and get it .. When you surf the web, you see many images, or pictures. Most
are pretty to look at, and often you might want to have a copy of that image
you see on some website, or even on Facebook or similar page. The web is a huge candy store for pictures, and you can actually
have any image you see on your screen downloaded and saved to your own
computer for your personal enjoyment or use. The standard pc way of doing this for decades now has been to
right click on the image you see on the web, And a menu pops up giving you multiple choices of what you want
to do with this picture:
From this menu the usual choices you can choose are to save the image, and you will save it in the
format it is stored on the web – jpg gif or whatever – and you
can store it anywhere on your computer, and you can rename it if you want –
or you can copy the image and then
paste into a document or whatever
you want to do with it. Often I’ll copy a web image and then paste it into a word
document, which is the way I usually do my Raw Bytes transcripts which are
stored online for you to read, and you will see images in them related to
the shows which I have found on the web and pasted into my transcripts. That’s how easy it is, and most people are unaware that
they – or anyone - can do this. Sounds great ….. wait a minute –
could someone take a picture off my Facebook page of me or some family member
? Absolutely – in the winkling of an eye. Well gee, maybe I wouldn’t want
someone to do that ….. ah, there’s the
rub! You see, ever since the web happened, now about 20 years ago,
and website owners began putting images of their goods and products online, some
people were worried about other people copying or stealing their images. You can put a copyright notice on your
website, but that’s not going to prevent anyone from copying the images
displayed. The most common method of trying to prevent this was to disable
the well known right mouse click with some webpage coding, but that would
only discourage the least computer savvy surfers. When someone tries the right mouse
click trick – a different menu pops up which tells the surfer that you’ve
disabled that feature, in anticipation of their bad intentions. But in that case, the next simple way to get that image is to
use another Microsoft
standard windows and dos feature – to capture the entire
screen you’re viewing with the image as part of it. You do this by pressing the print screen button, or Alt print
screen. You can now actually copy the full screen displayed, and you can
paste this full screen image into another program – like the standard
Windows paint program – and cut and paste out just the image you want, and
then save that image. Again these are not hacker tricks – these are standard
features built into the operating system. There’s also 3rd party
programs you can buy but they basically do the same thing. In a nutshell, There’s
really no way to protect your pictures online, so be aware that this happens
all the time. Particularly if you use social networking pages, and think that nobody
would ever see that slightly risqué or worse - picture
you just posted. If the night has a thousand eyes, how many more do you think are
on the web? For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2012 MTA Micro Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbxmenu.html (509)624-7230 |
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