3d ago

Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s

www.tomshardware.com

A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.

152 comments

Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫
Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.
- Latency tho....
How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?
- They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation
- 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.)
In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.
- Well, technically it has a built in backdoor...
  
  Please do not the bird
  
  More of a front and back door, if my understanding of a cloaca is correct
  
  People are making crude jokes but the truth is birds do have a back door it is whatever food they find tastiest. Birds are easily bribable like humans or dogs.
- Do you promise? All i want for Christmas is for starlings to fuck right off
  
  We're more likely to fuck ourselves right off, before starlings do. Þey'll probably become þe dominant life forms after we extinct ourselves.
  
  Starlings are cooler than you, though.
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.
- Hmm, not so sure. He produced a digital signal, who's spectrogram happened to be an image, and then played that digital signal to a bird. Dunno if a analogue spectrogram really even makes sense as a concept. The only analogue part of the chain would be the birds vocalisations, right?
  
  The whole sequence is:
  Digitally synthesized spectrogram (lossless)
  Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
  Heard by the bird (analogue, lossy)
  Reproduced by the bird (analogue, lossy)
  Captured by an ADC as a digital audio signal (lossy)
  Spectrum-analysed to observe a similar (but corrupted) reproduction of the shape in the original spectrogram
  To be transferring digital information, we would instead need to modulate and demodulate the digital signal (exactly like an old modem) so that the analogue corruption does not affect the digital signal:
  Image file (lossless)
  Bit stream (lossless)
  Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
  Heard by the bird (lossy)
  Reproduced by the bird (lossy)
  Demodulated to recover exact bit stream despite distortion (lossless again)
  Decode bit stream to recover original image file, bit-for-bit perfect
  I extremely doubt that this bird is capable of 2MB/s. For reference that would make it 280+ times fast than dialup, and barely slower than ADSL. This setup is basically just using the bird instead of a telephone line.
  
  The sound from the speakers he must have used was also "analog". Sound - defined as a pressure wave through a medium - can't be digital. Though the difference between analog and digital kinda loses meaning in cases like this.
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.
  
  Yeah. This could be in a plot in one of the episodes of the simpsons.
- The image 💀
- I was thinking about wind talkers becoming bird singers.
Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!
- They're just covering up the truth of the time cube
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.
- A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
- A murmuration could do it
- I like Benn Jordan a lot but I really doubt a bird can sing 2 MB / s. I saw the spectrogram and it looked pretty fuzzy
- You could find out which frame of the movie starlings like the best
We're finally getting tweets back
Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.
- Musician/Wizard/Activist
- The breadth of capability this guy has is insane to me. Almost every time I watch one of his videos I find that he's managed to basically gain a new field of expertise. It's really impressive.
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.
Hear me out! Bird factor authentication!
Please honk your seagull to unlock your ed25519-sk ssh key
- I've been honking my seagull all morning, until my wife came in and caught me...
  Now what do I do?
  
  Ask her to join you?
Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades
back to carrier pigeons?
Me, everytime I see a bird:
- better than me:
Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom
- Can you run Doom on it tho?
  
  Asking the REAL question
  
  You'd have to zip six birds together to get Plutonia on it.
- Do you need five starlings to sing a pentagram?
- The Trent Reznor version please.
This is a whole new twist over RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers
But, birds aren't real.
- This only seems to support the theory
- There are only flying dinosaurs.
- Lol ok there might be no real birds left but they definitely exist in the fossil record, it was likely the inventions of trains that drove birds to the next highest dimension (which isn't real, hence birds were real but now they are not).
Some people will use anything but cloud storage
- But. I mean. The data COULD reach the clouds I mean... Bird....
- It’s cloud storage and terrestrial storage. And it’s multi cloud. It’s the ultimate cloud hybrid!
?Fun? fact: In a steampunk world, birds would serve as CPUs. America experimented with using pigeons for bomb guidance. As it turned out, three birds pecking at an image had pretty good accuracy. They ultimately lost out to silicon, due to the size, maintenance, and training time.
- Fun speculation: we are CPUs for the information systems we inhabit, like scientific method, political ideologies, etc.
- There was an amusing short story about a guy who could do actual math in his head (I think it was by Asimov).
  Edit: found it, it's "The Feeling Of Power" by Asimov.
- They ultimately lost out to silicon
  Fuckin computers taking birds' jobs.
- They ultimately lost out to silicon
  for now....
Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.
good to see there are new developments in the IP Over Avian Carrier space
- Though this proprietary implementation of cloud storage for IPoAC is very innovative, it's really only useful for enthusiasts of the protocol and it comes with some security concerns. Writing data to the storage is inconsistent and requires a lot of effort on the uploader's part. And if you do manage to get the data to write properly, there's no guarantee retrieving the data will be lossless.
  The most worrying part for me, however, is that there's no guarantee that the data can be removed from the cloud without obliterating the server it's stored on or waiting for the device to degrade over time. Until these are addressed I don't think we'll see widespread adaptation.
What if I have bird blindness and I try and teach it to a duck?
- Ducks? That’s quackery.
- What's the deal with the parrot?
While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.
- not that kind of bird
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
- WW what? Which WW? I HAVE to know!
  
  Thus far, there mainly seem to be two options.
The video is by Benn Jordan, I wholeheartedly recommend this video and entire channel. Guy is a world treasure.
I heard the Falcon service is the fastest.
I got the error correction baseball bat!
Send a raven.
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world
In order to transmit/receive data during the night, a different carrier and modulation should be used: owls and a hoot-based Morse code (e.g. "ho-ho-ho-ho hooo-hooo-hooo hooo-hooo-hooo hooo" safely conveys "hoot" through the night skies).
B I R D S A R E N T R E A L
- Yep, obviously a government funded drone if it only has 2Mb uplink
I would have understood this text quicker if the picture wasn’t of a bird.
Edit: wow, this is really amazing! You can jump to 17:40 to see the comparison, but it’s worth watching more of it.
Make it an account on Twitter (I refuse to call that thing X)
- Closest I’ll do is call it Xitter (pronounced zitter)
So a moving target of data you cant reliably recall and might get shot by someone looking for food. At least its neat though.
- Average weight for a starling is less than 100g. The whole thing with head and feathers and bones and whatever. You'd have to be very hungry to hunt that. And I suspect if you shoot at it you'd pulverize it completely.
  Though cats are going to be a problem.
  
  There will be a lot of cases where the data gets accidentally encapsulated (then fragmented due to incompatible protocols) in a cat.
- Who on earth is gonna shoot a starling for food?
  Have you seen starlings? They can fit in the palm of your hand.
@Sony@lemmy.world

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