Outage Checking and Image Manipulation (GTL 202511)
Introduction
In this edition of GTL, the first link was inspired by the recent hiccups from AWS and Azure. The other two dive into the wild world of image manipulation and authenticity. You might even want to team up with colleagues and start your own Friday Photo Forensics Club—a playful nod to Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. Who knew pixels could be so mysterious?
Is It Down Right Now ?
Type: Outage-Checking
URL: https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/
In our highly connected world, one small headache for users is not knowing whether a website is down for everyone or just for you. When a favourite site fails to load, it could be due to your internet connection, your device, or an issue with the site itself. Figuring out the cause quickly can save time and frustration. This is where an online tool like IsItDownRightNow.com comes in handy.
IsItDownRightNow.com performs real-time status checks for websites. By entering a web address, you can find out almost immediately whether that site is up and running or if it’s experiencing downtime. It provides a straightforward, user-friendly interface along with comprehensive status reports. IsItDownRightNow.com also maintains a history of recent outages for each site – so you can see when a website was last reported as down and identify recurring issues over time.
Recent events underscore the value of such tools. In late October 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage in its Northern Virginia data centre region that knocked thousands of websites and applications offline worldwide. Popular platforms like Snapchat, Reddit, PayPal, Venmo, and many more went down as a result. This disruption lasted several hours before AWS managed to restore normal operations. During incidents like this, many people turn to outage-checking sites for quick confirmation of what’s happening. Instead of guessing or waiting for official statements, a quick lookup on IsItDownRightNow.com can immediately tell you if an inaccessible site is part of a broader outage or if the problem lies on your side.
FotoForensics
Type: Image Manipulation
URL: https://fotoforensics.com
The site we are sharing in this edition, FotoForensics.com, ties directly into this topic. Its main aim is to help you forensically determine if an image has been altered. As clearly stated in the tool's documentation, this isn't a one-click-to-result site but rather a toolkit that helps you figure out whether a photo has been manipulated.
Before you start loading photos, you should read the available tutorials and guides. Today, many photos are manipulated—be it to make a model look younger or thinner, remove a blemish from an object, or increase saturation. While we might find these changes acceptable, they still represent a distortion of the reality the camera captured.
FotoForensics.com provides a suite of tools to analyse different aspects of an image. Here are the main areas it covers:
- File Digest (Summary): Shows basic file info like format, size, and cryptographic hashes. Useful for: Verifying if two files are identical or spotting unusual file characteristics.
- Metadata Analysis (EXIF Data): Reveals hidden data such as camera model, timestamp, GPS, and editing software. Useful for: Verifying if the image matches its claimed origin or has been edited.
- Error Level Analysis (ELA): Highlights compression inconsistencies in JPEGs. Useful for: Brighter areas may indicate parts of the image that were edited or added later.
- Similar Image Search (Reverse Search): Links to search engines to find the image or similar ones online. Useful for: Spotting reused or miscaptioned images and finding originals.
- Hidden Pixels: Detects invisible content like transparent layers or embedded thumbnails. Useful for: Exposing poorly hidden edits or leftover data from previous versions.
- ICC Profile (Colour Profile Info): Displays colour space data (e.g., sRGB, AdobeRGB). Useful for: May hint at editing software use or inconsistencies across image sets.
- JPEG Quality (%): Estimates how much compression the image has undergone. Useful for: Low quality may suggest the image is a copy or has been heavily edited.
- Strings (Text Extraction): Extracts readable text from the image’s binary data. Useful for: Can reveal editor names, hidden comments, or software tags not shown in standard metadata.
- Service Info / Source: Technical details about the analysis and upload method. Useful for: Mainly record-keeping or sharing analysis results.
When using FotoForensics, it's important to remember several key points:
- It provides data, not conclusions. You must interpret the results carefully yourself.
- Tools like ELA can be misleading if not used correctly.
- Metadata can be faked or stripped, and a reverse search may miss obscure images.
- It works best on JPEGs and images that have undergone minimal transformations.
- This is a public site, so avoid uploading sensitive or confidential content.
- Don't jump to conclusions. Bright spots in ELA or missing metadata don't automatically mean manipulation. Always use the tutorials and cross-check findings before making claims.
- For the most reliable results, it should be used in combination with other forensic methods and manual inspection.
Becoming good at detecting adjusted photos requires practice. If you enjoy detective stories, this site can help you become a sleuth in this specialised area of digital forensics. Study the documentation, head over to your social media platform, and download a couple of photos of politicians, artists, or anything you think looks too good to be true. Have they been altered?
AI Image Detector from Decopy AI
Type: AI Image Detection
URL: https://decopy.ai/ai-image-detector/
Beyond photo manipulation, another increasingly complex challenge is determining whether an image was generated by artificial intelligence. Unlike manipulated photos — which begin as real images captured by a camera — AI-generated photos are entirely fabricated from scratch. While both Decopy AI’s Image Detector and FotoForensics.com address image authenticity, they serve distinct purposes.
Decopy AI’s Image Detector is specifically designed to identify whether an image was produced by AI. The process is straightforward: visit the Decopy AI website, upload an image (with caution when handling sensitive photos, as processing occurs on an external server), and let the system analyse it. Within seconds, the tool provides a Confidence Score — a percentage indicating how likely the image is AI-generated versus human-made.
For example, in our test case, the tool reported an AI likelihood of 28%, meaning Decopy AI estimated only a 28% probability that the image was generated by AI. However, the photo was, in fact, AI-generated — a reminder that even advanced detectors can misclassify results.
AI image generation has progressed rapidly, producing visuals that are increasingly photorealistic and “no longer obviously fake.” Each new generation of AI models delivers more lifelike results, making detection ever more difficult. Decopy’s own website notes that “as AI gets better at faking photos, tools like an AI image detector become crucial.” Yet this also means that detectors themselves must continuously evolve. No AI detector is fool proof, especially as new image-generation techniques emerge.
When we examined the same image using FotoForensics.com, the analysis revealed areas of digital manipulation. However, such findings can apply equally to both real and AI-generated photos. AI-generated images are often created by layering or blending multiple visual elements to produce the final composition — a process that inherently involves digital manipulation.
While Decopy AI promotes its product as an AI image detection tool, it also has a valuable alternative use: creators of AI-generated images can use it to evaluate how natural their outputs appear. Regardless of intent, it remains ethically essential to label AI-generated content accurately.
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