Free DME & DFIR Resources

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, announces another attempt at a privacy bill that's certain to be opposed by law enforcement organizations.

Full story

The iTwin USB dongle isn’t new: it started life as a easy way to transfer files between two computers without a wire. It looks like two USB drives stuck together at the tail, and its it worked admirably moving files from one computer to another as if there was a hard cable between them. Well, it just added another awesome feature through software, which is real encryption for your Dropbox.

Full Story

Let me start by saying that I am by no means trying to imply that DVR, NVR or any other digital or IP based video system cannot produce good quality video evidence. There are even 2 or 3 high-end, mega-pixel quality digital surveillance cameras and systems on the market today whose capabilities far exceed those of a traditional analog based system. However, to my point, it seems more often than not digital based systems are producing very poor quality video evidence regardless of the system's actual capabilities.

So why do DVRs typically provide poor quality video evidence? Here are a few of the common reasons:

"Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline." - https://blender.org

This is a project I've known about for some time, but hadn't looked at in quite awhile.  Wow.  VFX & compositing geeks are going to love Blender 2.92.

Let's make it another great week my friends, be safe out there! 😎

The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA) is offering a $200 discount to government employees who sign-up to take two of their most highly sought after courses - Forensic Imaging Techniques and Photographic/Video Comparison.  The courses will be held back-to-back June 9 - 15 at the LEVA DME Lab, which is located at the University of Indianapolis.

Visit the LEVA Web site for complete details!

The first devices that take advantage of the new standard's 10Gbps data-transfer speed should arrive in 2014. Too bad for Thunderbolt.

Full story

You don't need to own a Ring device, and no subscription fees for just their neighborhood service. See alerts from Ring users in whatever size area you'd like. View a newsfeed for your area or a map, and customize your alerts. Three suspicious events reported within a 3 mile radius from me within the last month, and one crime at a Ring user's next-door neighbor.

The Law Enforcement & Emergency Services Video Association International, Inc. (LEVA) has launched an entirely new website for members and visitors! I'm proud to have been given the opportunity to work with LEVA on providing new capabilities and services for LEVA members, and hope everyone enjoys the new site.

Visit www.leva.org today!

We've already been hands-on with NVIDIA's first Kepler GPU, but all those fancy features count for nuthin' if the benchmarks don't back them up. So do they? Huh? Do they? NVIDIA told us to expect a 10 to 40 percent performance boost from the $499 GTX 680, versus AMD's pricier Radeon HD 7970, and it appears that was no exaggeration.

Full Story

The Adobe Photoshop 12.0.2 update for Mac and the Adobe Photoshop 12.0.2 update for Windows are now available for download. The Adobe Photoshop 12.0.2 update fixes a number of high priority bugs including painting performance and type-related issues. The most significant fixes in the Photoshop 12.0.2 update include...

Full Story

Here's one that flew in under my radar.  I do recall some discussion about the related working group's creation a few years ago, but somehow completely missed the July, 2010 release of their document.

Learn more about this Homeland Security project by visiting their website:
http://www.safecomprogram.gov/SAFECOM/currentprojects/videoquality/videoquality.htm

Check out version 1.0 of the guide itself here:
http://www.safecomprogram.gov/NR/rdonlyres/5BCA1CBF-1500-4B29-9370-81B823575DE8/0/3aVideoUserRequirementGuidedoc.pdf

P.S. - Thanks to Mike Baker for bringing this one back into my radar.

I've used everything from freeware tools to high-end encoders to accomplish various audio & video trans-coding tasks over the last 15 years or so, and when time permits, I love testing out new tools.  Recently, when installing software on to a new PC, I decided to try another low-cost solution that's been around for quite some time, but I've never used; AVS Video Converter.

Commencing the process of forming its Standards Committee, the Consortium of Digital Forensic Specialists (CDFS) is pleased to announce its appointment of Dr. Pavel Gladyshev to the position of Chairman of the Standards Committee. In this role, Dr. Gladyshev will facilitate the committee's mission of uniting practitioners from all sectors to discuss and develop digital forensic standards.

Full Story