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Tim Bray: I was nuking a few dozen pieces of Sobig.F dung that had made it through the mail filter, recognizing a few of the names that had been forged in the ?From? and ?To? fields, not recognizing more, and it occurred to me that each instance of this virus contains an assertion about three people: that one of them knows the other two. There?s a business plan lurking in here.

Globe & Mail: Since the introduction of computer-based recording systems in the mid 1990s, musicians and producers have used electronic "tuning" to correct out-of-tune performances.

Older acts like the Doors and Bob Dylan may not have sang on pitch, but about many newer punk bands, such as Sum 41 and Good Charlottes, use autotuners because they would sound awful otherwise.

Hardware: Anteares Autotune 3

Examples: Before | After

Similar:

Greg's Digital Makeovers: On this image I was asked to make her look younger, take out the wrinkles and pores...

Soundscan: Everyone who hears [Cher's] 'Believe' immediately comments on the vocals, which are unusual, to say the least. Mark says that for him, this was the most nerve-racking part of the project, because he wasn't sure what Cher would say when she heard what he'd done to her voice. For those who've been wondering, yes -- it's basically down to vocoding and filtering.

The XML world has been debating Postel's Law the last few days.

"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."

Personally I disagree with the first half of the law when applied to XML -- the idea that aggregators should bend over backwards to accept poorly formed XML. I always understood that XML was trying to do something different, as a response to the awful mess that HTML became because browser vendors adopted the first half of Postel's philosophy.

Anyway, the other half of Postel's Law is just as interesting, but so far no one is commenting.

That, btw, was the purpose of my funky campaign a few weeks ago. Maybe I should have called it Dave's Campaign for the Second Half of Postel's Law.