In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.
post
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.
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.
A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.
Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom
Can you run Doom on it tho?
Asking the REAL question
Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" just got a whole lot worse.
Some people will use anything but cloud storage
Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades
But, birds aren't real.
good to see there are new developments in the IP Over Avian Carrier space
Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.
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.
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
Me, everytime I see a bird:

Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!
Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.
Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫
The video is by Benn Jordan, I wholeheartedly recommend this video and entire channel. Guy is a world treasure.
What if I have bird blindness and I try and teach it to a duck?
While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.
?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.

top 50 comments