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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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[-] ISOmorph@feddit.org 178 points 10 months ago

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

[-] PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 89 points 10 months ago

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

[-] hoch@lemmy.world 86 points 10 months ago
[-] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 11 points 10 months ago

Do not what the bird?

Complement?

Conflagrate?

Carry in a cute baby stroller?

[-] ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 22 points 10 months ago

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

[-] unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 14 points 10 months ago

Last time I checked, cloaca was just the back. It is the everything door, though.

[-] einkorn@feddit.org 11 points 10 months ago

Well, technically the beak connects directly to the cloaca.

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[-] Korkki@lemmy.ml 128 points 10 months ago

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

[-] brsrklf@jlai.lu 30 points 10 months ago

If you take control of enough birdhouses you can launch DDoS attacks.

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[-] khannie@lemmy.world 72 points 10 months ago

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

[-] brsrklf@jlai.lu 52 points 10 months ago

And they say physical media is dead!

[-] Tikiporch@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago

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

[-] Cort@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] brsrklf@jlai.lu 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

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[-] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 33 points 10 months ago

A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.

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[-] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 66 points 10 months ago

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

[-] Psaldorn@lemmy.world 27 points 10 months ago

Musician/Wizard/Activist

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[-] Vespair@lemmy.zip 61 points 10 months ago

We're finally getting tweets back

[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 51 points 10 months ago

Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom

[-] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 28 points 10 months ago

Can you run Doom on it tho?

[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago
[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" just got a whole lot worse.

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[-] muzzle@lemmy.zip 40 points 10 months ago

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

[-] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 38 points 10 months ago

Some people will use anything but cloud storage

[-] thedruid@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago

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!

[-] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 10 months ago

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

[-] Gerudo@lemmy.zip 26 points 10 months ago
[-] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 21 points 10 months ago

This only seems to support the theory

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[-] ScrotusMaximus@lemmy.zip 24 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] xc2215x@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] gozz@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

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!

[-] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] gozz@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

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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[-] salty_chief@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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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[-] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 19 points 10 months ago

Me, everytime I see a bird:

[-] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

better than me:

[-] Cocopanda@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] Rakonat@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.

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[-] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[-] magikmw@piefed.social 11 points 10 months ago

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

[-] WindyRebel@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 9 points 10 months ago

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

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[-] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 8 points 10 months ago

?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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[-] Hatsune_Miku@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

back to carrier pigeons?

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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
874 points (98.2% liked)

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