Free DME & DFIR Resources

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).

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.

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This brief (approx. 9min.) introduction into the world of digital video evidence is intended to provide law enforcement professionals with a better understanding of the basic concepts and related issues.  It was geared towards first responders, who in many cases are the ones initially seizing video evidence.

By Lance Whitney

A new kind of memory from IBM Labs is promising to revolutionize how much data we can store and how fast we can access it on our mobile and desktop devices.
After spending six years as a theoretical concept, the memory, dubbed Racetrack, finally is a huge step closer to reality. Researchers at IBM have recently confirmed that their theories of the physics behind Racetrack are valid and can be used to develop and manufacture this new type of memory.

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1080 for sure, that's in the name.  They're all the same thing folks, and I'll be darned if I can find any formal video specification referencing any of them, so they share that too.  Is it all just marketing BS?  No, but surely the confusion has been leveraged by some DCCTV manufacturers, resellers, and the like to their benefit.

If you're using Picasa you don't need to read any further, as I'm sure you already know this.  If you're not using Picasa for any reason, let me tell you one of the main reasons I do.   As you probably know Picasa is a pretty handy little free program for editing, managing and sharing your photos, but I rarely use it for any of those things.  What I love most about Picasa is the included Picasa Photo Viewer application.

I recently completed an upgrade of our DCCTV Wiki and wanted to announce some significant changes that I've implemented. First and foremost, the Wiki is no longer a private members-only resource. Effective immediately, I have also migrated DME Resources and the Wiki to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Previously the Wiki was only available to our over 1,800 verified Professional Community members. Interested parties that do not meet our Professional Community membership requirements are now welcome to participate in the DCCTV Wiki.

Digital signatures enable paperless contracts and can speed up business transactions. The 2001 E-Sign Act was meant to ease the adoption of electronic signatures, yet the mechanics of what makes up an e-signature were left deliberately wide open.

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Windows 8 will introduce a slew of interesting features, but will they benefit you?

Upgrades, system migration, support headaches -- IT folks are probably dreading the next major Windows rollout. Yet Windows 8, which is scheduled to move to the beta stage in late February and will likely launch in the fall, does offer several compelling new features for both IT and end users.

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The Journal Gazette reports that the Fort Wayne police have released security video from an armed robbery that occurred last week at the McDonald’s at 1103 Goshen Ave. in Ft. Wayne, Indiana

The video is available on YouTube and is also playing on our home page. Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 436-7867 or 1-800-237-7867. All information is confidential.

Apple is once again offering the previous version of its professional video-editing software after getting mixed reactions on a newer version.

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We recently purchased a new cellular phone for our eight-year-old son. The phone allows him to make or receive calls only from a defined list of telephone numbers, which we enter into it, and provides emergency 911 access. A few months ago, a friend of his from school came over and she had a new LG Migo "kid-friendly" cellular phone from Verizon Wireless. Once we saw the LG Migo, we knew we'd be getting him a cellular phone long before we had initially planned. While the Migo is a neat device, we ended up going with the Firefly, which uses Cingular's network.

The Firefly can be used as a pre-paid device, or you can subscribe to a monthly service plan. As with nearly all pre-paid services, the per minute rates are a little outrageous ($.25/min.), but since we anticipate minimal usage, we should be alright for the immediate future. The fact of the matter is this was an impulse purchase, and we may eventually change to the LG Migo and Verizon Wireless anyway.

It looks like Sony is on a roll with discontinuing legacy recording formats. First it killed the cassette Walkman last year, a few weeks ago it stopped producing MiniDisc Walkmans and now the company announced that it will no longer support the 8mm video format. The video cassette format that was popular way back in the 1980s will no longer get any new Sony hardware to run on.

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