Free DME & DFIR Resources

Resolution Video, Inc. recently announced a new course entitled "Courtroom Presentations Using Adobe Flash", which will be held March 10-12, 2009 in Tucson, AZ. The course will be taught by Paul Hartzell, who published a very well received article on the topic here on Media-Geek several months ago (click here to read the original article).

I was out in Indianapolis last week to assist with the LEVA Level 1 training course. Another great week of forensic video and DME training provided by LEVA, and hosted by the University of Indianapolis.

It was an action packed week both in the classroom and out with students learning and practicing DME fundamentals, and the City bustling with NBA playoff and Indy 500 activities. Thank you to LEVA, their staff, my employer Ocean Systems, and the students for such an incredible opportunity.

Safe travels home everyone and have a great holiday weekend!

CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police (Met) has said.

Det Ch Insp Mick Neville, who heads the Met's identification unit, said CCTV images were "treated like fingerprints and DNA" by the force.

The number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year.

Full story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12080487

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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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).

From day one I have sought to provide a secure online platform for Digital & Multimedia Evidence (DME) professionals to connect and share information.  For several years now, I have considered hosting an annual DME Resources Peer Networking & Training Event.

Of course, one of the many challenges is location.  Our members are from all over the world, not just the U.S. and Canada.  Naturally, this lends to "Regional" annual events, which in turn leads to Regional Coordinators, etc. 

Sweet niblits!  Use your Verizon Pre Plus as a Wi-Fi mobile hotspot...for free!    

Check out : "Verizon Mobile Hotspot on webOS devices now free, Pre Plus and Pixi Plus fall to $49.99 and $29.99" - Verizon Mobile Hotspot on webOS devices now free, Pre Plus and Pixi Plus fall to $49.99 and $29.99

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.

By Ryan Paul

Developers Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and Jason Garret-Glaser are creating a native VP8 video codec implementation for the open source FFmpeg project. The aim of this effort is to bring first-class VP8 support to FFmpeg and demonstrate the feasibility of producing an independent VP8 implementation.

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For those that do not know, Websense is a Web/Email security company that now sells a multitude of products, to include software and hardware.  Many government agencies use them, as ours did initially when I was with a NY agency, and quite frankly my first-hand experience with them was more problematic than problem-solving.  I totally get error-ing on the side of caution, but at the same time find overly cautious classifications based on IP addresses is not the way to filter the Web; especially given that the vast majority of the Web is hosted on shared servers.  Anyway, since I've responded to a few of these email inquiries from our users lately, I figured I share my canned email response globally with all users....

A new report from Sonic Foundry and the Center for Digital Education shows instructor and student benefits from a video-driven flipped classroom approach to learning.

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I've posted a new tutorial on Adding & Managing Events, and you'll find it on the Tutorials page under the Help menu after you login.  Did you know that you can setup recurring events in our community calendar, so that you don't have to do a seperate entry for your regular user group or other meetings?  Check out this brief new tutorial for more information.

As more and more companies turn to Linux for mission-critical operations, making sure IT staff have the necessary skills is becoming more important than ever.

That's a significant challenge, because demand for Linux skills now far outstrips supply, making them a particularly hot commodity in the hiring market as companies large and small struggle to equip themselves with the talent they need.

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