Free DME & DFIR Resources

Headed out to Cincinnati, OH today for the IAI's 101st Forensic Educational Conference. If you're attending, stop by the Ocean Systems booth (#513) and say hello! Safe travels my friends. - LC

Last week I was back in Albany, NY to provide a free seminar on digital video evidence at the New York State Police Academy, followed by Ocean Systems 3-day DVR Assessment & Video Recovery training course. It was a sold-out class comprised of both students new to the field, as well as very seasoned digital and video evidence technicians and analysts. The end result was a really great week of training and peer networking. Many thanks to all of those who attended, and special thanks to the New York State Police (NYSP) for hosting both events!

The NYSP had a new academy class under way as well, with approximately 250 new recruits marching to-and-from the various classrooms within their renovated facilities. It was very cool to see so much activity at the academy again throughout the entire week. Best of luck to all the recruits in training. Hang in there and regardless of the outcome, thanks for stepping up to the plate!

A few weeks ago, I signed up for Amp'd Mobile service, and shortly thereafter received my new Kyocera Jet multimedia phone via FedEx. I was immediately very impressed with the look, size and form factor. I've always been a flip man, but I'm very keen on this slider from Kyocera.

The new OS is very cool, user friendly, and customizable. The Amp'd multimedia service is pretty sweet, effectively replacing my previous phone, mp3 player, and even the game system for short trips, etc. The microSD capability adds even more value, as you can simply transfer your existing content from the PC using the provided SD adapter. It should be noted that you cannot transfer purchased music from iTunes to the device or card as it is protected; however, you can rip CD tracks all day long or transfer other unprotected content (music, vids, images) - supports mp3, aac, mp4, 3gp, 3g2, m4a, and m4b file types.

This week the SWGDE released a couple of new DRAFT documents for public comment relating to DME acquisition. The links below are directly to the related PDF documents. For more information please visit www.swgde.org:

• SWGDE Best Practices for Data Acquisition from Digital Video Recorders
• SWGDE Best Practices for Digital and Multimedia Evidence Video Acquisition from Cloud Storage

Maybe I'm showing my age here, but I remember way back when Norton products were actually a good thing for your PC. Okay, I suppose that's a little too harsh, but the fact of the matter is that Symantec has gotten awful fat over the last couple of decades. By fat I mean that their flagship products (Antivirus & Internet Security) have become more of a resource drain than they are of assistance to a small business or home user.

In the corporate world these products still dominate, and don't seem to be as useless as I feel they've become for the small office or home network. As a matter of fact, Symantec claims to have 99% of the Fortune 1000 companies as customers. Pretty impressive, huh? Remind you of anyone??? You see where I'm going here.

The World Series can be quite a spectacle at times, and a single photo often can’t do justice to everything that’s going in the game. So will 360 hi-res photos compiled into a mammoth panorama do? Yes, please.

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Apple's security and OS updates included the latest version of QuickTime, which Apple has just made available for Windows PCs.

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A video I found interesting that was recently published by the Post Falls, ID Police Department:

Myths, Misconceptions and Realities Associated with Police Use of Deadly Force

The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association is providing a free course — Video Essentials for First Responders — for attendees of its 2013 LEVA Digital Multimedia Evidence Training Symposium, which runs Sept. 9-13 in Asheville, N.C

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CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police (Met) has said.

Det Ch Insp Mick Neville, who heads the Met's identification unit, said CCTV images were "treated like fingerprints and DNA" by the force.

The number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12080487

The Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP. (Photoshop CS6 does not support Windows Vista.) In addition, all subsequent Photoshop feature updates specifically for Creative Cloud members will no longer support Windows XP.

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A major revamp of the ports and cables of the ubiquitous connection technology will make USB connectors reversible, slimmer, and better at transmitting data and power.

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Want to know what to encode with for great H.264 files? Robert Reinhardt, founder of VideoRx.com, is happy to tell you. One minute into his recent Streaming Media West presentation on how to evaluate H.264 encoders he gave the big reveal: FFmpeg is the best choice around.

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