Snapchat blames other apps for nude photo leak

The messaging app says it's not responsible for the leaking of thousands of private photos by hackers. Also, Dairy Queen is hit by a credit card data breach, and Microsoft's CEO needs good karma after bad advice.

An estimated 200,000 Snapchat users have had their private photos hacked, but Snapchat is putting the blame on sketchy apps that promise to backup the disappearing snaps. In this CNET Update video, get the details on the nude photo hack nicknamed "The Snappening."

Almost everything can be hacked these days. Not even your Orange Julius is safe. Dairy Queen is the latest company to be hit by hackers, with customer credit and debit card data stolen from nearly 400 stores.

Satya Nadella can't blame his recent blunder on a hack. Microsoft's CEO backpedaled after giving bad advice at a woman's tech conference, telling the audience that women shouldn't ask for raises.

But this Update roundup isn't all depressing news. Watch until the end for a peek at Sony's PlayStation-streaming smartphone and a tablet with a built-in projector:

CNET Update delivers the tech news you need in under three minutes. Watch Bridget Carey every afternoon for a breakdown of the big stories, hot devices, new apps, and what's ahead. Subscribe to the podcast via the links below.

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A quick photo primer on Instagram's Hyperlapse app

Instagram's new Hyperlapse app helps stabilize video and speeds up time. Nick Statt/CNET

Instagram announced a standalone iOS app, Hyperlapse, on Tuesday that shoots video that can be sped while remaining smooth thanks to an image-stabilization algorithm that reduces shakiness. To exercise your creative time lapse muscles, however, a brief photography refresher and some simple tips will go a long way.

A hyperlapse is a specific technique under the umbrella of time lapse photography. A traditional time lapse is a lengthy snippet of footage that gets sped up in post-processing to compress time. That way, you can view hours of video of a sundown, a night's sky, or a bird's-eye view of cityscape in a matter of minutes -- even seconds.

Standard time lapses are generally static or involve only slight motion. In contrast, a hyperlapse involves motion and combines the elements of a cinematic tracking shot with a time lapse.

Instagram The big idea here is to show fast movement of the camera across distances -- think accelerated shots out of a car window while you're driving along a windy road. This usually requires expensive equipment like a Steadicam stabilizing unit since moving a camera shooting live video and then speeding it up tends to exacerbate any slight hand movements you've made.

Instagram's new app boils seeks to offer quick fix solution to these myriad problems into one mobile package. The app's creators didn't want the function to be buried in Instagram's toolkit. There are two features: the start-and-stop recording button and the speed dial. The video either can go into your camera roll or directly to Facebook or Instagram.

Here are the basics to keep in mind when using Hyperlapse:

Time lapses work best when you're able to speed up a typically slow-moving event, like the movement of the sun or a cloud formation. The same applies when you want to emphasize the chaos of countless unrelated movements in a tight space. Anyone who's ever been stuck in a Manhattan traffic jam can relate.

Due to the limitations of mobile, you need to be aware of the camera angle as well as your distance from the action if you're going to successfully turn all those subtle movements into a concentrated flow. That means finding a good vantage point where the key motion is relatively limited to a certain aspect of the frame or takes place uniformly across the frame.

With Hyperlapse's time lapse feature, the key for taking stationary shots like the one above is to shoot from far away and, preferably, from a point of elevation. That way you're able to concentrate the camera on one direction of motion to emphasize the attention around an interesting slice of a scene.

Even more so than when using a standard stationary time lapse, hyperlapses involve getting creative with motion as it relates to time. That means the desired effect depends upon the duration of your shot, the subject's speed and your distance.

Instagram's app lets you accelerate a shot up to 12 times its normal speed. For capturing an image of an airline lifting off, just two or three times the shot's speed yields a neat effect. For stationary shots taken farther away, you'll want to experiment with the higher-end of the speed dial. But it also means that you'll need to capture anywhere between one and a half to two minutes of video to get even a 10 second clip at 10x speed or more.

Hyperlapse offers users a simplified too,l but it doesn't let you customize the speed after-the-fact. You only get one opportunity to choose. Nor does the app let you speed up, slow down different parts of a shot or stop and start the recording to achieve a stop-motion effect. While both features may get included later on, it's important to understand the limitations both of Hyperlapse and of the world you're capturing with it. Experimenting with what works -- and what doesn't -- is the best way to figure this stuff out.

One of the key functions of a hyperlapse, sometimes called simply a moving time lapse, is to snap shots while riding on a moving object as opposed to taking a video of moving objects while standing still.

That means shots while riding a bike along a simple path work great, especially to emphasize movement. Shooting a video from the passenger window of a car or or plane is also a good place to start. Instagram itself advertises everything from trampoline jumping to rollercoaster rides:

With image stabilization, you need not worry about shaky video as the camera moves through space. That also eliminates one of the barriers to filming those more mobile scenes. And because Instagram's main goal is let people curate personal daily snapshots of their lives as if they were mini-movies, Hyperlapse fits right in, giving users the chance to shoot the scenes that Hollywood studios spend multi-thousand dollar equipment to illustrate.

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PicsArt Photo Studio (for iPhone)

Extra in-app purchases available for clipart, fonts, and ad-removal.By Michael Muchmore

With Instagram, Flickr, and countless other photo-enhancing-and-sharing apps like EyeEm, Mobli, do we really need another photo social network? Though the obvious answer is "of course not," there's always room for a fun new app that does something people want. Though not quite yet a household name, PicsArt is among the most-installed photo apps in all three major mobile OS app stores. And it gets ratings of higher than four stars in all of them, so clearly it's filling some need. The app is free to install, but offers a healthy selection of in-app purchases, including a $5.99 option that simply removes ads.

Getting Started With PicsArt
I tested the app by installing it on my trusty iPhone 5. Versions are available for iOS 6 and later, as well as for Android and Windows Phone. You can start to get a feel for what PicsArt can do without even creating an account—a trait I like in any app I'm testing. On first run, a tooltip saying, "Tap to start creating," points to what I'd call a butterfly icon, which sits where the camera button usually is in photo apps. This icon is flanked by buttons for your photo feed, Explore (to see images shared by other users), Contests (more on those later), and an overflow menu.

When you tap the butterfly, you see the app's differences from the typical photo/social app: You get a four-pronged choice of editing existing images, going to the camera, creating a collage, and drawing. There's also a Shop button for fonts, clip art, and ad-free use. Happily, there are just as many free items as paid in the shop, including World Cup soccer bracket diagrams.

Editing
With the Editing choice, you not only can start with photos in your camera roll, but also those from Facebook, Flickr, and Dropbox. When getting images from Flickr to edit in PicsArt, you don't even need a Flickr account: You can browse, search, and eventually edit public photos on the service.

The PicsArt app interface is fairly well designed and powerful, though it can get busy at times because of the multitude of options. You can pinch to zoom, reveal more controls with a plus button, see before and after views of your image, undo the last action, and reset your picture to its original state.

Once you start editing an image in PicsArt, you immediately see the app's appeal: It has oodles and oodles of photo editing tools—not only Instagram-style filters that are more adjustable than those in Instagram, but also curves, masks, clone/stamp, cropping with shape, brushes, borders, text and lens flares. Photoshop, watch out! And don't even get me started about clip art. There are sets for travel, sports, nature, birthday, mustaches, baby, love, rabbits…the list goes on and on. Some are in-app purchases, usually for 99 cents, but many are free.

Drawing tools also push the app into Photoshop territory, with more than 20 brush types and shapes that transform on a 3D plane. You can adjust the opacity, size, and even the "squish" for the marker brush. You get 30 font choices for text overlays, with a color picker and font sizes from 1 to 150. You can start a drawing with or without a photo background.

Of course you also get red-eye correction, tooth whitening, stamp-and-clone, and blemish removal. The blemish tool did a good job on minor skin issues. One thing you don't get—at least not as powerfully as in Adobe Mix and Photoshop Touch—is auto-object selection and edge detection. For example, when I brushed artificial tan onto a friend's face, the brown overlay affected the background as well as his skin. The cloning tool is fun, but don't expect content-aware object removal like that in Adobe's Photoshop and Mix.

Collages
Collages: You've seen them on Instagram and elsewhere, and maybe you wondered how they were made. Collages aren't possible with most photo social apps, but, as you might expect, PicsArt offers a cornucopia of layouts, borders, and backgrounds for collage creation, as you can see from the image below.

Sharing
The app's wealth of editing tools means you can put serious time into working on an image. You can save the picture to the Camera Roll at any point with a button tap, but naturally you'll want to share that work with others, and the app is by no means deficient in sharing options. Facebook and Twitter direct sharing are options, and when uploading to PicsArt's own service you have options to simultaneously share to Flickr, Tumblr, and DeviantArt. The Export option adds Instagram, as well as any app you have that accepts photos as input.

If you have Instagram blinders on, you may not have noticed PicsArt's surprisingly active photo-sharing community. I'm always amazed at how often new social services can come along and still manage to build up a decent quorum of users. That said, its community is still dwarfed by those of Flickr and Instagram. When uploading an image, you can add keyword tags and location, specify whether the photo should be private or public (the default), and specify whether it includes mature content (a toggle lets you view mature content, but it's off by default).

The app—and the PicsArt website for that matter—allow all the standard social networking activities—commenting, favoriting, and following. The interface is well-done and intuitive, making good use of swipe gestures, though it's not going to win any innovation prizes. When you first "heart" a photo, you're asked whether to share that fact to Facebook. Thankfully, you can turn this off.

Contests are a nice plus from PicsArt, and they make sense, given the numerous creative tools the app offers. The users vote, and the winners are highlighted on PicsArt's blog.

The Formula of PicsArt's Success
PicsArt takes just about the opposite approach to photo enhancing from what Instagram does. Where the latter stresses simplicity, PicsArt offers vastly more image-editing options. Not only are its filters more adjustable, but it offers near-Photoshop-level tools like layers, clone stamp, curves, and masks. Drawing tools and clip art make it far more than just a photo app. All of this, however, comes with a risk of gaudy pictures, which Instagram does a good job of preventing by limiting the options and the extent to which those limited options can affect images.

Those who love to tinker with photos on their phones and jazz them up to the hilt should immediately dump Instagram for PicsArt. Or at least use PicsArt to edit before sharing pics to Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, and the rest. But they may just find enough like-minded image makers on PicsArt's own robust social network to satisfy their needs. For the largest app community and some pretty nifty photo tools of their own, however, stick with our iPhone social photo app Editors' Choices, Flickr and Instagram.

View the original article here