News written by Petteri Pyyny (July, 2019)

In our article series, we're digging into AfterDawn's news archive and looking what happened exactly 20 years ago. This article series also celebrates AfterDawn's 20th anniversary.

So, lets see what kinds of news we wrote back in July, 1999. I'd like to remind you, our readers, that back then, AfterDawn was strictly focused on digital audio and video technologies and reporting events in those genres. More generic "all about tech" arrived to our site much later.

Software update: Winamp

One of our core news reporting areas back in the day was to report about major a/v software updates. And one of the most note-worthy of those was definitely Winamp and its Winamp v2.24 update back in July, 1999.

Back then, Winamp was - by far - the most popular music player software in the world. It was light-weight, supported all the music formats available back then and most of all, it was extremely customizable.

But Winamp's story from those haydays to the modern times has been a bumpy, interesting - and bit sad. Software was originally developed by a small company called Nullsoft and, originally, by its founder, Justin Frankel. Entire Nullsoft was sold to AOL at the beginning of June, 1999 - just before AfterDawn was launched - for a whopping $400 million.

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FaceApp is an image manipulation app that caused a craze in social media back in 2017. Now, the craze is back, after the company updated its ageing filter last weekend. To be honest, the ageing filter is simply amazing - the results are very, very believable and realistic.

But. The company developing FaceApp is based in Russia. And this means that, as per Russian legislation, all data passed to the company, can be accessed by Russian security and military services, if they want to.

Old Kurt Cobain - FaceApp from r/interestingasfuck

Kurt Cobain via FaceApp's ageing filter

So, does the app upload all of your images and data to Russian servers? Apparently, the answer is no. Sure, the app asks for your permission to access your phone's images, but it only accesses the one you select for manipulation.

A security researcher has tested what the app actually sends to the Internet and where the data goes to. The conclusion is that all the uploads are being sent to Google or Amazon -owned cloud servers, located in U.S., Australia or Europe, depending on applied filter and user's own location. The actual image manipulation with filters is being done on servers, which then sends the processed image back to the user's smartphone, once finished.

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