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.

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[–] 178 points 1 year ago (17 children)

In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.

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  • [–] 89 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Well, technically it has a built in backdoor...

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  • [–] 86 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    More of a front and back door, if my understanding of a cloaca is correct

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    [–] 128 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Imagine the possibilities for piracy and secure messaging (provided that the birds don't snitch on you).

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    [–] 72 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.

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  • [–] 52 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And they say physical media is dead!

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The average lifespan of a starling is usually between two and five years.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    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

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    [–] 66 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.

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    [–] 61 points 1 year ago

    We're finally getting tweets back

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  • [–] 51 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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    [+] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)
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    [–] 40 points 1 year ago

    This is a whole new twist over RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Some people will use anything but cloud storage

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago

    Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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    [–] 24 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    good to see there are new developments in the IP Over Avian Carrier space

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    [–] 23 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.

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    [–] 20 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    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!

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    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.

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    [–] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    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

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    [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Me, everytime I see a bird:

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!

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    [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.

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    [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    The video is by Benn Jordan, I wholeheartedly recommend this video and entire channel. Guy is a world treasure.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What if I have bird blindness and I try and teach it to a duck?

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    [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    ?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.

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    back to carrier pigeons?

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