While doing our detailed forensic analysis, we bumped into a very strange story that has a doctored photo at its core. I'm not going to put you through the full story of the email controversy, but I thought you'd get a kick out of the wacky photo retouching aspect of it.

"If you're not familiar with Sleestaks, perhaps you're just not geeky enough."

I've pulled that portion of the story from our special report and adjusted it to be more relevant to digital photographers and those with a twisted sense of humor. In this article, we also take a closer look at the retouching itself -- and an interesting mistake.

Coptix cops to a digital chop
As anyone with any visible presence online can attest to, the so-called "blogosphere" can be a pretty cruel place. I've certainly gotten my unfair share of digital badmouthing. While some incredible journalism can and does take place on blogs, there's also a whole lot of judgement, shoot-from-the-hip reporting, and vitriolic opinion bubbling up from the bowels of blogs.

We're not the first to look into the White House email controversy, although it seems we're doing the most comprehensive analysis and we're most definitely one of the few without a political axe to grind. Apparently, a bunch of folks with a definite political bent found out the same thing we did: that a small Chattanooga Web developer named Coptix runs a DNS server for GWB43.COM (a domain representing George W. Bush, the 43rd U.S. president).

Super-briefly, a DNS server is like a phone switch for Internet domain names. You give it a domain name and it gives back an IP address. Apparently, Coptix runs such a server and one of the domains on the server belongs to the Republican party. This is not a big thing. DNS servers just route data. There's no political element to the process at all. It's just a simple database entry and its not unusual for providers of DNS services to be unaware and unaffiliated with the domains they route.

However, some bloggers went wild about this "discovery". These bloggers made the unsupported assumption that just because GWB43.COM exists, its mere existence implies that "all" White House email was routed through it. They then took the next unsupported leap, claiming that those operating the servers were obviously hiding the emails.