Free DME & DFIR Resources

We've all been there. Sitting in a dimly lite room watching someone read the text off from their PowerPoint presentation. Responding to email under the table as we listen to the monotone disseration, looking up only during the brief breaks which occur between slides. Glancing around the room just in time to see one of your colleagues bounce their chin off from their chest. How many foreheads need to hit the conference table before we put an end to this senseless mid-day slaughter? I can tell you this, SlideRocket clearly doesn't want to find out.

SlideRocket is a rich internet application (RIA) being developed by a privately owned, venture funded, San Fransisco based company. The application is developed using Adobe Flex and Amazon's Simple Storage Services (S3), and it's sleek, user-friendly interface is entirely Flash based. It's not browser or platform dependent, so regardless of where you or your team may be or whether you're running the local player from a PC, Mac or Linux box, you're all good. While the presentation authoring tools are impressive, there are a plethora of other features and capabilities you won't find in related desktop apps that I personally find even more exciting.

Earlier today I deployed a new Members-Only chat system for our professional community members. Once a member logs in they'll find a small chat bar in the lower right-hand corner of their browser. Now members can immediately know who's online, chat one-on-one with them, or even invite members to a group chat by simply clicking the invite button next to their name. Do you use Skype? Great, click the chat settings icon (gear icon) and enter your Skype ID; now members can quickly click-to-call you via Skype video too!

Like all DME Resources content, Members-Only chat is served via a minimum of a 128-bit encrypted connection; 256-bit in many cases. For those occasions when you're not feeling very social, you can click the settings icon and deactivate the chat feature. Give it a go and let me know your thoughts. As always, thanks for your participation!

When Canonical broke the news recently that Ubuntu 10.10 will include uTouch 1.0, a multitouch and gesture stack, it caused a flurry of excitement about the Linux release's potential for use in tablets.

Full Story

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) is again seeking comments on proposed standards for new digital video cameras for police vehicles with April 25, 2011 listed as the new deadline for comments.

Full story:
http://governmentvideo.com/article/103844

On Windows 7 and Windows 8 the default skin for Windows Media Player overlays the playback controls on top of the playback window, much like many Flash or HTML5 player skins. If you prefer the classic/corporate skin look, it's still there and only takes a few clicks to get to...you just have to dig a little. Click here for Microsoft's Windows Support post on the topic.

Sometimes it's the little things that make all the difference.

By Sean Hollister

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 hasn't even been officially announced, much less reviewed, but that won't keep you from buying the company's latest Fermi-based graphics card anyhow. Over at Newegg, usual suspects ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Palit have fielded twelve models in all, most with slightly different features, thought it seems the base configuration has 336 CUDA cores (down from 352) and a mere 768MB of GDDR5 memory.

Full Story

Many types of laboratories gain accreditation to ISO 17025, regardless of the arena the laboratory works in, the same prerequisites must be established and implemented before accreditation may be obtained. The purpose of this article is to provide laboratories with an overview of a logical sequence towards, and identify the prerequisites required for, accreditation. It is hoped that the “road map” concept will provide a logical journey through the accreditation process.

Read Full Story

Just a quick note to let prospective members know we haven't forgotten you over the last few weeks, we've just been busy upgrading and migrating our platform.  We'll begin processing the dozens of applications from the last few weeks soon.  Thanks for your patience and interest!

Here's a list of 25 articles, how-tos, production guides, websites, white papers, webinars, presentations, and conferences that can help you cut through the confusion about the H.264 video codec, learn what it is, and start using it for online video.

Full Story

It’s sometimes difficult for traditional Computer Forensic (CF) examiners to understand why they should treat video and multimedia any differently than other types of digital evidence. After all, a bit is a bit, and a byte is a byte. Right? CF examiners are typically highly trained and highly technical people. If anyone is going to understand how to recover and interpret multimedia data, one would think that a traditional CF examiner would be at or near the top of your go-to list. The problem with this assumption is that multimedia data is fundamentally different than most other types of data, and in more than one way.

On vacation, but thought I'd comment on this topic before getting on the Harley to go run some errands in the cold Pacific Northwest. As pointed out in someone else's recent blog post, MPEG-4 can leverage what is referred to as a Sample Aspect Ratio (SAR)...not to be confused with Storage Aspect Ratio (SAR) or Signal Aspect Ratio (SAR). It's important to note that in the case of MPEG-4, the Sample Aspect Ratio is the Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR); they are one and the same.

It's also important to note, again, that regarless of any of these numbers, the shape of the samples from an analog source ARE NOT DEFINED BY THE NUMBER OF LINES.

Oh, one more thing...most multimedia NLE and encoding applications provide precise control of all of these settings.  Just an FYI.  All the best my friends.

In the last few weeks, we've added several new features and content areas to Media-Geek, and more are on the way. Some of these updates are specific to our members only area, while others are available to both the public and private sections of the site; such as our new customizable home page.

By default, the new home page displays recent articles from a few of our content areas, such as Member Articles, Media-Geek News, Larry C.'s Blog, and Newsflashes. Both members and visitors can change the number of articles that are displayed on the home page for each of these areas, and they can also re-order the way in which they are displayed using the drag-n-drop icon in the upper-right corder of the display for each area.

Do You Have a Blog or Podcast?

Brett Shavers, author and one of the main developers of the WinFE forensic boot environment, has released a free online training course on WinFE.

Online training is a great way to supplement classroom training, providing it's from a well organized and reputable source. It's great to see more options for online and flipped classroom training related to digital forensics, and I can assure you you'll be seeing even more soon! ;)