In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
871 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
74736 readers
2805 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Well, technically it has a built in backdoor...
More of a front and back door, if my understanding of a cloaca is correct
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(16 replies)
Imagine the possibilities for piracy and secure messaging (provided that the birds don't snitch on you).
If you take control of enough birdhouses you can launch DDoS attacks.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫
2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.
And they say physical media is dead!
The average lifespan of a starling is usually between two and five years.
This just gave me an idea for a new movie rental service. You'll never own anything. If we can get homing pigeons to learn movies, we could cut delivery costs
They tried to make this a thing once :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-D
If Disney did this, they'd probably just poison the birds so they die faster.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
load more comments
(3 replies)
We're finally getting tweets back
Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.
Musician/Wizard/Activist
load more comments
(1 replies)
Not to be a wet blanket, but every time this comes up I get annoyed by some factual inaccuracies in the articles about this. It is not digital! He drew an image on a computer, but converted it to an analogue spectrogram to store on the bird. That's neat as hell, but it's not digital. The image that he got back was slightly corrupted.
Now I would be fascinated to see a follow-up seeing if you can actually modulate a digital signal and have is survive a round trip through the bird bit-for-bit accurate. I suspect in reality it would be much lower data rate, but definitely not nothing!
By your definition nothing can be digital since the world is analog. Even the bits in your CPU are voltages in transistors. As such, every real life signal can be distorted.
The point with digital transfers is that you round it back to either 0 or 1, hoping that no bits are distorted enough to have any loss at all.
Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.
load more comments
(9 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
Hear me out! Bird factor authentication!
Please honk your seagull to unlock your ed25519-sk ssh key
load more comments
(2 replies)
Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!
load more comments
(1 replies)
Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades
This is a whole new twist over RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers
Some people will use anything but cloud storage
But. I mean. The data COULD reach the clouds I mean... Bird....
load more comments
(1 replies)
How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?
Pigeon guided missile but instead of pigeon it's a parrot and sings relevant source code in hex and an interpeter assembles it.
(I hate the last 4 words that sentence I made.)
They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation
Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.
load more comments
(1 replies)
good to see there are new developments in the IP Over Avian Carrier space
load more comments
(1 replies)
I want this to be the next reveal in a movie or TV series, in the same fashion as the one of the Navajo "backing up" the Smoking Man's magnetic tape in The X-Files.
Birds are the OG text device. Tie a little note and send them on their way.
One famous example is Cher Ami, a pigeon who delivered a message that saved a group of surrounded American soldiers during WW1.
Edit: WW1 and WW3 /s
load more comments
(3 replies)
view more: next ›