Free DME & DFIR Resources

Microsoft said Friday that next week it will finally issue a patch for a vulnerability within its Microsoft Graphics (GDI+) component, one that is being actively targeted by attackers.

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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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Community member Jimmy Schroering has launched a new site called DMEforensics.com. Jimmy's old domain jdsdevelopment.com will redirect to his new site, but only for the next week or so. Take a moment to visit & bookmark today.

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.

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Just a heads up that I will be doing some planned maintenance on DME Resources this weekend, so the site may be momentarily unavailable at times throughout the weekend. I will be adding some new functionality to provide users with more control of their content, along with a consolidated area where they can manage content and preferences.

As always, if you have any questions, suggestions or concerns please don't hesitate to contact me. Thanks for your continued participation. Have a great week!

LEVA has announced that they will be providing their Photographic/Video Comparison Course May 18-22, 2009 in the LEVA DME Lab at the University of Indianapolis. The Photographic/Video Comparison focuses on the science of comparing known objects, vehicles, clothing and humans with CCTV images of questioned objects, vehicles, clothing and humans.

For LEVA's complete training schedule - click here.

LEVA will be providing the Advanced Forensic Video Analysis & the Law course September 14th - 18th, 2009 at the LEVA DME Lab. Only graduates of LEVA's Basic and Intermediate “Forensic Video Analysis and the Law” courses may apply, and seating is limited.

Visit the LEVA training schedule for the latest on all of LEVA's course offerings or click here for the complete advanced course details (PDF).

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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Bugs are a way of life in software--fortunately, so are bug fixes. Earlier this week, Adobe released Photoshop 12.0.1, which brings a number of stability enhancements to the professional image-editing software, including several specifically related to 64-bit operation on Mac OS X.
Though Adobe says that CS5 is more stable than its predecessor, CS4, there's always room for improvement. The 12.0.1 update addresses a number of issues that could cause slow performance, as well as several common crashing bugs, user interface and workspace issues, font-related crashes, and several painting-related issues, including problems with video layers.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique to take advantage of the "fused architecture" emerging on multicore CPUs that puts central processing units and graphics processing units on the same chip. The technology, called CPU-assisted general purpose computation on graphics processor units (CPU-assisted GPGPU) uses software compiled to leverage the architecture to allow the CPU and GPU to collaborate on computing tasks, boosting processor performance on average by more than 20 percent in simulations.

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A couple weeks ago I was up in Vancouver to teach Ocean Systems’ DVR Assessment & Video Recovery training course, which was hosted by the Vancouver Police Department. Many thanks to our host agency and students, as it was another great week of training and information sharing. Next week I’ll be in Miami to provide a free seminar on Digital Video Evidence on Monday morning, followed by our 3-day DVR Recovery training course which will run Tuesday through Thursday.

After 20 years, the digital camera makers are finally giving the world what it really wants: spectacular, professional-looking photos — from a tiny camera. There’s only one problem with this new category: nobody knows what to call it.

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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.