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Police Can Timestamp Any Audio Recording From Background Interference Alone
A team of forensic researchers from the Metropolitan Police in London, UK, claim to be able to accurately timestamp any audio recording—using just the background electrical hum present in any digital recording.
The grid supplies power across the country in the form of AC electricity. The signal that's pumped across the country and into our homes has a main frequency at which it oscillates—60 Hz in North America or 50 Hz in Europe. The presence of mains power creates low-level interference, at that frequency, that all our electronic devices have to deal with. Its perceptible in audio recordings as a quiet background hum.
For most of us, that noise is irritating. But the forensic researchers have observed that the frequency of the hum actually changes subtly over time, with fluctuations of a few thousandths of a hertz. That's a result of supply and demand: when loads are higher, the frequency drops just a little.
Interestingly, the way these changes happen is unique—which means that the variation in that irritating hum can be used as a fingerprint. Compare variations of frequency around the 60 Hz mark in an audio recoridng to a log of national variations, and it's possible to accurately pinpoint the date and time the recording was made with no other information.
Actually everything I see says firearms are the number one murder weapon. Where did you get the baseball bat stat from, Ren?-J-Mac (December 13, 2012, 09:58 PM)
I was just doing random reading, and came across it. It was just some article about the most common murder weapons. Not even sure how I ended up there. I was looking for something like this, but with two additions:
- I would like to do this in batch, handling all jpg's in a single folder
- I would like to make the colored square picture and greyscale square picture
So whenever I shoot a series of 10 pictures, my aim would be run something like this and have 30 pictures at the end. I would be OK with automated cropping, but I would not mind cropping each one myself. The process of savind the copies in specific names would help me A LOT (something like Image001.jpg -> Image001c.jpg & Image001bw.jpg).
Would you be willing to add this? That would be great!-Marcel25 (December 03, 2012, 04:39 PM)
Choon is an esoteric programming language.
Its special features are:
Output is in the form of music - a wav file in the reference interpreter
There are no variables or alterable storage as such
It is Turing complete
Choon's output is music - you can listen to it. And Choon gets away without having any conventional variable storage by being able to access any note that has been played on its output. One feature of musical performance is that once you have played a note then that's it, it's gone, you can't change it. And it's the same in Choon. Every value is a musical note, and every time a value is encountered in a Choon program it is played immediately on the output.
Some people were harmed yes... But for a typical corporation to blink it takes a minimum of 100 nuns and orphans to raise an eyebrow of caring. Kind of like Firestone and Ford playing Duck season vs. Rabbit season back in the 90s. Apple (i feel) caved in a timely fashion.
...Now stop arguing before I accidentally say something nice about Apple and have to be horsewhipped.-Stoic Joker (December 13, 2012, 09:53 AM)
Talk about humiliation for Apple... That has to hurt.-Renegade (December 13, 2012, 07:49 AM)
Hay, at least they showed the sense necessary to admit defeat before there was an actual body count.-Stoic Joker (December 13, 2012, 09:17 AM)
The DonationCoder community has a reputation of being rather obsessed with finding the best tool for the job. This obsession leads us to sometimes be rather critical of the flaws of software that doesn't meet the requirements to be the best of the best.
Our honesty is a good thing, if you are a developer looking to improve your software. If you receive a less than stellar review, pay careful attention to it and the discussion that follows, and dedicate yourself to fixing the issues that were brought up, you'll be well on the path to having your software among the best of the best.-app103 (December 13, 2012, 08:37 AM)
Windows? Really? Hm. Guess I need to check some newer phones then. Last time I checked, they sucked badly. I have an HP Windows PDA, and man... sucky just doesn't begin to describe it. It's a bit older though, and I suppose that I'm being a bit harsh there.-Renegade (December 13, 2012, 04:22 AM)
A bit older?? The fact that it's called a P.D.A. puts it back about a decade. I've yet to hand my HTC Aspire (WMP7) to anyone that didn't comment on how smooth the graphics. Several folks had to flip it over to check the logo before commenting/believing it was Windows..-Stoic Joker (December 13, 2012, 08:54 AM)
But, that's ancient history. 
In the middle of the night at a U.N. conference in Dubai, the presiding chairman of the International Telecommunication Union conference surveyed the assembled countries to see whether there was interest in having greater involvement in the U.N. governing the Internet. A majority of countries gave their approval.
The proposed resolution resolves that the secretary general of the U.N. "continue to take the necessary steps for ITU to play an active and constructive role in the multi-stakeholder model of the Internet," according to a draft of the text.
The preliminary draft resolution also states, "To foster an enabling environment for the greater growth of the Internet ... that, as stated in the WSIS outcomes, all governments should have an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance and for ensuring the stability, security and continuity of the existing Internet and its future development and of the future internet, and that the need for development of public policy by governments I consultation with all stakeholders is also recognized."
blackwhite - The ability to accept whatever "truth" the party puts out, no matter how absurd it may be. Orwell described it as "...loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."
Google Maps return to iPhone with new mobile app
The world's most popular online mapping system returned late Wednesday with the release of the Google Maps' iPhone app. The release comes nearly three months after Apple Inc.
Interesting thing on BBC Radio 4 this morning - Apple have allowed Google to offer a GoogleMaps App again on their products.for Apple.
-Carol Haynes (December 13, 2012, 06:37 AM)
The privy works best for me-phitsc (December 13, 2012, 05:30 AM)
Internet service providers having to store for a year all details of online communication in the UK - such as the time, duration, originator and recipient of a communication and the location of the device from which it was made.We've had this in .dk for several years now - every connection must log {src,dst}{ip,port} as well as timestamp, and a full packet dump of every... dunno, 1000th packet or something. It's something of a privacy violation, and utterly useless for police work - and costs the ISPs a truckload of money, both for paying database consultants (both storing and capturing that amount of data isn't trivial), expensive whOracle licenses, and a fair amount of hardware. It's insane.-Carol Haynes (December 11, 2012, 09:28 AM)
Oh, and superfluous. The Danish PET have other much more efficient ways to intercept the data streams... and so have the NSA, obviously.-f0dder (December 13, 2012, 03:30 AM)
I'm not voting since there's no "IT SUCKS AND APPLE ARE BASTARDS THAT MUST DIE" optionStill, to give it credit, animation on iOS is far superior to Android or Windows.Android yes (their graphics stack is horrible - Google made a bad choice in not designing with hardware acceleration from day 0), but Winphone no - at least the Winphones I've seen have been noticeably smoother than iOS (lumia800 class HW+OS and forward).-Renegade (December 12, 2012, 09:47 PM)-f0dder (December 13, 2012, 03:45 AM)
For Labour, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the government was "making a complete mess of a very important issue".
"It is important that the police and security services can keep up to date with modern technology, but this bill is too widely drawn, is unworkable and gives far too much power to the home secretary without proper safeguards."
She added: "It is astonishing that the Home Office have had so little discussion with the internet companies who need to deliver this legislation. The Government have been slipshod with this bill from the word go."
Just a Tech Noobs opinion, I don't have a cell phone, text, tweet, facebook (maybe 1 day), but as far as the site goes. Everyone I have sent a message to has replied, and when I ask a stupid Noob question in forums someone always tries to help! NO your stupid, WHAT a DA, or the the dreaded your a NAZI stuff replies. I've been on a few that
all it is a giant click, or everyone raggs on someone.-SQUIDMAN (December 13, 2012, 01:57 AM)
If Apple occasionally seems to get more than its share of criticism and put downs, that's only because Apple's condescending attitude towards the rest of the world in general invites an equally snarky response when they drop the ball or play games with their customers.-40hz (December 12, 2012, 09:30 PM)
"God created the integers. All the rest is the work of man." - Leopold Kronecker-40hz (December 12, 2012, 07:11 AM)
BLASPHEMER~!
Them is Phi'ting words~!-Renegade (December 12, 2012, 07:43 AM)
Not blasphemeny at all. I asked Cthulhu. He/it agrees.
-40hz (December 12, 2012, 09:37 AM)
Aren't you about one year early?-Tinman57 (December 12, 2012, 06:03 PM)
