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This just in from MacRumors.com, "A Circuit Court judge in Virginia has ruled that fingerprints are not protected by the Fifth Amendment, a decision that has clear privacy implications for fingerprint-protected devices like newer iPhones and iPads. According to Judge Steven C. Fucci, while a criminal defendant can't be compelled to hand over a passcode to police officers for the purpose of

The Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) began sending out letters to subject matter experts a few weeks ago. OSAC is part of an initiative by NIST and the Department of Justice to strengthen forensic science in the United States. Of particular interest to the readers of this blog, the IT/Multimedia Scientific Area Committee (SAC) has named and published its committee Chairs. The

Amped Software announced another update today. "First of all the IFrame seek added in the previous version has been improved to work on all filters (with the exception of Frame Selectors). As usual, we had a lot of our users requesting the conversion of specific DVR formats. In this update we added 3 new DVR formats (PAR, MGV, DRV). PAR and DRV, were already supported but we added a new sub-type

This just in from the AP: "Police in New Hampshire are using a relatively new application to collect photos and videos they hope will lead to arrests following weekend chaos at a pumpkin festival. More than 80 people were arrested after parties got out of hand Saturday in Keene, leading to property destruction and injuries. Police in riot gear used tear gas and pepper balls to control crowds as

The recent update to Amped Software's FIVE brings a welcome refresh of the Filters panel. As you scroll down the filter group (left side), the individual filters move along with you - justified to assure that they're in view when you highlight a specific group. I know, it's a little thing. But it's the little things that make life worth while. Use the Check for Updates feature to make sure

Given Sunday's post about the many people out there claiming to be experts in Forensic Video Analysis, I began wondering if the courts could/should enforce a Code of Ethics. I think many of the organizations out there for people that do what we do have some sort of statement about ethics or an actual Code of Ethics. The IACIS, for example, has theirs on their membership page. IACIS Code of

At a recent training session, the topic of what to do with filters if you've used them but don't want to have them influence what's being displayed - but you still want them on your report. Obviously, you can throw filters away. But, in doing so, the filter's settings won't appear on the report. In the Filter Settings box (top right) you'll see a small check box. This is the On/Off button.

Homeland Security Today recently featured a story on the partnership between MediaSolv and Amped Software. Whilst it's true that no single vendor provides an end to end solution for our digital evidence needs, this new partnership gets really close. When you factor MediaSolv's work with Cellebrite into the equation, MediaSolv looks even better. Check out the article here.

This just in from Forensic Focus: "We find ourselves analyzing new surveillance videos almost every day, and in most cases we can either solve the problem very quickly or understand (even quicker) that there is no information to recover in the video. In special cases though, where something very specific and strange happened, or the problem is very complex, it can take a lot of time. As always…

This just in ... The Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence (SWGDE) is pleased to announce the posting of a new draft document for public review and comment: "SWGDE Best Practices for Handling Damaged Mobile Devices" at https://www.swgde.org/ In accordance with SWGDE policy, draft documents will be posted for a minimum of 60 days for public comment. The first page of each draft document

Over at the Washington Post, there's been a series of articles quoting various current and former law enforcement officials and politicians predicting doom, gloom, and madness if Apple and Google go through with their plans to include encryption into their next generation of operating systems. In the latest article, the outgoing US Attorney General essentially asks companies to do it for the