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The Law Enforcement & Emergency Services Video Association has announced the introduction of a new certification. LEVA will now confer Certified Forensic Video Technician (CFVT) status on students who have performed video evidence processing for at least one year and successfully complete its three core courses within a five-year period:

• Basic Forensic Video Analysis & the Law,
• Intermediate Forensic Video Analysis & the Law and
• Advanced Forensic Video Analysis & the Law.

The courses, totaling 120 hours of lecture and hands-on instruction in LEVA’s Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab at the University of Indianapolis, are designed to lead students to an advanced level of competency, knowledge and skills as Technicians in the science of forensic video analysis.

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A new imaging system could use opaque walls, doors or floors as 'mirrors' to gather information about scenes outside its line of sight.

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It's the video millennium. Every modern mobile phone is a video camera and a video player. Video displays are everywhere, from taxicabs to endcaps. Webcams perch like pigeons on every major tourist destination in the world. So it's no surprise that video sharing has become an industry, and that legal controversy has followed. The Southern District of New York recently announced its much-anticipated decision in Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube Inc., 2010 WL 2532404 (S.D.N.Y. June 23, 2010), granting summary judgment in favor of YouTube. The decision breaks no new ground, but it continues a trend: Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, owners of copyrights to videos will have the burden of policing the internet.

Full story:
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202466695461

The Scientific Working Group for Imaging Technology (SWGIT) has released a DRAFT of "Best Practices for the Retrieval of Digital Video" for public comment. The comment period ends April 19, 2013.

Visit SWGIT

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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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

Just finished reading the CNET article "Cops to Congress: We need logs of Americans' text messages". As someone who has analyzed mobile devices and call records for law enforcement for many years, I'm not surprised at all that law enforcement wants service providers to store more data. As a citizen of the United States, I'm a bit surprised the public seems to be sleeping on this one.

Make no mistake people, the issue under consideration here is whether or not you have the right to communicate via text message privately.

By Joseph L. Flatley

Toshiba announced a new self-encrypting disk technology today, which is sure to be welcome news to the those of you who work with sensitive data, wish to keep your extensive True Blood fanfiction collection under wraps, or are just plain paranoid. The imaginatively named Wipe ships with the company's TCG-spec'd Self-Encrypting Drive models, allowing sysadmins to securely erase user data when a machine powers down, when an encrypted HDD is removed from the system, or when a leased machine is returned to its owner. And this ain't just for PCs -- the system is also designed to work with your copier and / or printer system. Interested? Of course you are!

Check out the complete PR:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/10/toshiba-wipe-deletes-your-encrypted-data-so-you-dont-have-to/

When a vendor sends us a demo system, it typically take great care to ensure that we experience the system exactly as the maker intends us to. So when VESA, the trade group responsible for the DisplayPort standard, said that it was sending PCWorld a multiple-monitor demo system similar to the one it exhibited at CES in January, I expected it to arrive bundled with a detailed guide and all the software needed to present DisplayPort in its best light.

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Beaten paths are necessary, but so to are the paths we often walk alone. You know, those that are inundated with brush, bushes, thickets and unknown scary things.

If we all stayed on the same path, always, it would take forever for us to get anywhere we haven't been before.

When describing the current fleet of BD burners on the market, one word that certainly doesn't come to mind -- sleek. Pioneer is aiming to change all that, though, with the BDR-XD04. What it lacks in a catchy name it makes up for with a slim and light clamshell design that doesn't make too many sacrifices in the features department. At just under 8.5oz and 0.55 inches thick, it puts most of its competitors to shame. Now, it settles for just a 6x write speed and skips USB 3.0 in favor of the more common (and slower) 2.0, but it is capable of drawing power entirely from your machines peripheral ports. (Though, you'll have the option of hooking up an AC adapter if you wish.) And don't worry about format support -- the BDR-XD04 will handle everything from quad-layer 128GB BD-Rs to old-school CDs with aplomb. The slim new burner will start shipping in the middle of this month for $150.

Full Story w/PR:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/05/pioneer-unveils-worlds-smallest-and-lightest-external-blu-ray-b/&category=classic&postPage=1

Contrast ratio is the most important aspect of a TV's performance. More than any other single metric, a set's contrast ratio will be the most noticeable difference between two TVs.
That is, if you could juxtapose them. Which you can't. Or if you could compare their claimed specs. Which you can't.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20066138-1/contrast-ratio-or-how-every-tv-manufacturer-lies-to-you/

A brief video discussing the basics of multimedia metadata analysis & some of the Open Source and/or Freeware solutions that can help. Solutions discussed include:

• Exiftools, by Phil Harvey - https://exiftool.org/
• MediaInfo & MediaInfoOnline - https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo​
• FFprobe & FFmpeg - https://www.ffmpeg.org