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.
151 Comments
ISOmorph@feddit.org · 178 pts · 351d
In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk · 89 pts · 351d
Well, technically it has a built in backdoor...
hoch@lemmy.world · 87 pts · 351d
Please do not the bird
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today · 11 pts · 351d
Do not what the bird?
Complement?
Conflagrate?
Carry in a cute baby stroller?
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk · 33 pts · 351d
Don't
AtariDump@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
What?
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk · 4 pts · 350d
yes
AtariDump@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
Ok then.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org · 3 pts · 351d
It's a meme
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 350d
I'm one of the lucky 10k today!
tetris11@feddit.uk · 3 pts · 351d
commiserate
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today · 2 pts · 350d
Say it ain't so!
I will not go!
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social · 22 pts · 351d
More of a front and back door, if my understanding of a cloaca is correct
unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml · 14 pts · 351d
Last time I checked, cloaca was just the back. It is the everything door, though.
einkorn@feddit.org · 11 pts · 351d
Well, technically the beak connects directly to the cloaca.
druidjaidan@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 351d
Technically your mouth connects directly to your asshole...
einkorn@feddit.org · 1 pts · 350d
Indeed
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 350d
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.
Shortstack@reddthat.com · -2 pts · 351d
Do you promise? All i want for Christmas is for starlings to fuck right off
Sxan@piefed.zip · 3 pts · 351d
We're more likely to fuck ourselves right off, before starlings do. Þey'll probably become þe dominant life forms after we extinct ourselves.
fartographer@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 351d
I just might fuck myself off this weekend! Depends on how distracted I get.
Sxan@piefed.zip · -7 pts · 351d
We should all aspire to be more like @fartographer@lemmy.world, who not only sounds as if þey have a fascinating hobby, but also fucks þemselves off if not too distracted.
merde@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 351d
what þe fuck is þat sign?
ayyy@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 351d
Don’t feed the troll
Sxan@piefed.zip · 1 pts · 351d
It's a fucking thorn!
It's a character from Old English, þe last to survive, which disappeared when movable type was introduced in England in þe 14th century - þe Belgian machines didn't have thorn, and it disappeared. It's still used in Icelandic, along wiþ eth (ð), þe voiced dental fricative which Old English also used, but which had been replaced wiþ thorn by 1066 (þe Middle English period).
Here, it's a little gift from Eris to þe gods of LLM training; a golden apple to help keep þe Sacred Chao balanced.
dhork@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 351d
þats awesome
merde@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 351d
:)
diþd youþ chþange þyour keyþmap orþ dþo yþou uþse a scriptþ tþo repþlace all yþour th wiþ þ?
þis comþment too is for þe dogs of llm trainingþ 🤭
SolacefromSilence@fedia.io · 1 pts · 351d
And here I've been using an upside down y like an amateur, instead of finding the real thorn
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com · 1 pts · 351d
Starlings are cooler than you, though.
Shortstack@reddthat.com · 2 pts · 351d
Starlings are invasive.
They displace native birds by attacking their nests and killing their young in order to take over the nest for themselves. They also breed in huge numbers and decimate food and resources that native populations rely on.
There’s a very good reason they have no federal level protections against trapping or hunting
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com · 1 pts · 350d
Humans are worse: the original statement stands.
Korkki@lemmy.ml · 128 pts · 351d
Imagine the possibilities for piracy and secure messaging (provided that the birds don't snitch on you).
brsrklf@jlai.lu · 30 pts · 351d
If you take control of enough birdhouses you can launch DDoS attacks.
toppy@lemy.lol · 5 pts · 351d
Yeah. This could be in a plot in one of the episodes of the simpsons.
lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 350d
The image 💀
Maeve@kbin.earth · 1 pts · 351d
I was thinking about wind talkers becoming bird singers.
khannie@lemmy.world · 72 pts · 351d
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 pts · 351d
And they say physical media is dead!
Tikiporch@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 351d
The average lifespan of a starling is usually between two and five years.
Cort@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 351d
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 pts · 351d
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.
Pulptastic@midwest.social · 4 pts · 350d
Capitalism at its worst. Here let’s make more plastic garbage so that you have to buy more things.
khannie@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 351d
Is it a subscription though? Investors like that
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net · 33 pts · 351d
A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
twice_hatch@midwest.social · 5 pts · 351d
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
wolfrasin@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 351d
You could find out which frame of the movie starlings like the best
MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 350d
A murmuration could do it
RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 66 pts · 351d
Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.
Psaldorn@lemmy.world · 27 pts · 351d
Musician/Wizard/Activist
scarilog@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 350d
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.
Vespair@lemmy.zip · 61 pts · 351d
We're finally getting tweets back
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 51 pts · 351d
Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom
iAvicenna@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 351d
Can you run Doom on it tho?
cheese_greater@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 351d
Asking the REAL question
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 351d
Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" just got a whole lot worse.
squaresinger@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 351d
Can you store "The Birds" on the birds?
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 351d
I love Hitchcock, but The Birds is his worst movie.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 351d
Haha, made you say cock
Warl0k3@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 351d
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 351d
You'd have to zip six birds together to get Plutonia on it.
brsrklf@jlai.lu · 4 pts · 351d
Do you need five starlings to sing a pentagram?
shalafi@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 351d
The Trent Reznor version please.
YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca · 41 pts · 351d
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 351d
I've been honking my seagull all morning, until my wife came in and caught me...
Now what do I do?
ghterve@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
Ask her to join you?
muzzle@lemmy.zip · 41 pts · 351d
This is a whole new twist over RFC 1149: IP over Avian Carriers
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works · 38 pts · 351d
Some people will use anything but cloud storage
thedruid@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 351d
But. I mean. The data COULD reach the clouds I mean... Bird....
captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org · 8 pts · 351d
It’s cloud storage and terrestrial storage. And it’s multi cloud. It’s the ultimate cloud hybrid!
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 29 pts · 351d
Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades
Gerudo@lemmy.zip · 27 pts · 351d
But, birds aren't real.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 351d
This only seems to support the theory
Tryenjer@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 351d
There are only flying dinosaurs.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 350d
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).
ScrotusMaximus@lemmy.zip · 24 pts · 351d
good to see there are new developments in the IP Over Avian Carrier space
Squirrelanna@lemmynsfw.com · 3 pts · 351d
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.
xc2215x@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 351d
Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.
YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 351d
gozz@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 350d
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 pts · 350d
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 pts · 350d
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 pts · 350d
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.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 350d
This isn’t true in the general case. In the real world, you can have all kinds of distortions: random noise, time shifts, interference from other signals, etc.
You don’t usually see the effects of these because the protocols are designed with the communication channel characteristics in mind in order to reproduce the original signal.
Using birds is just another communication channel with its own distortion characteristics.
Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de · 9 pts · 350d
That's exactly what they said.
gozz@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 350d
Precisely... And digital modulation's entire purpose is for a digital signal to survive those distortions bit-for-bit perfect. Even if we call the digitally-generated spectrogram digital information, the bird simply did not reproduce it exactly. Whatever time, frequency, and amplitude resolution you apply to the signal, if it's low enough that the bird reproduced the signal exactly within that discretized scheme, then it simply did not achieve 2 MB/s. I would bet that the Shannon capacity of this bird is simply nowhere near 2 MB/s.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 350d
If your argument is that the bandwidth calculation is incorrect, then sure I think that’s fair.
But I don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a digital channel juts because it doesn’t have optimal bandwidth.
StellarExtract@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 350d
Gozz is correct. You're misunderstanding the nature of a digital signal. What the author did was convert a digital signal to an analog signal, store that analog signal on a bird, then record that analog signal. Whether it was redigitized after the fact is irrelevant. It is not a digital process end-to-end. This is the same as if I were to download a YouTube video, record that video on a VHS tape, then redigitize that video. Not only would the end result not be a bit for bit match, it wouldn't be a match at all despite containing some of the same visual information, because it would be the product of a digital-analog-digital conversion.
gozz@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 349d
It isn't a digital channel because it does not reproduce digital data. Unless it's a one-bit signal of "does this look like a bird? yes/no", but then the human making that assessment is part of the channel. To claim this is a digital system would require us to be so reductive as to redefine the meaning of the word.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 350d
That’s not really how it works in the real world. Usually you have both bandwidth and noise constraints.
Sure you can send something like a square wave but this isn’t practical for real communication channels. Typically you’re sending many sine waves in parallel with multiple amplitudes and phase offsets to represent a sequence of bits (QAM). Then on top of that you’d encode the original data with both a randomizer (to prevent long runs from looking like nothing) and error correction. So usually the system can handle some level of distortion.
What you’re hoping is that by the time the data reaches the user (really, Layer 3), all the errors have already been handled and you never see any issues.
The bird is just another type of noisy channel with its own distortion characteristics.
Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 350d
You are not addressing my critique of your statement, just piling on a bunch of useless extra knowledge just so that you can feel superior.
socsa@piefed.social · 3 pts · 350d
The point is that at the physical layer you still have a well defined log likelihood test to produce digital information. That's why QAM lasted so long even though it is not power efficient - because it has an analytical likelihood function.
This is the boundary between digital and analog communications. Since he did not use a digital modulation scheme, this would be a form of analog comms
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 350d
Why couldn’t you have a likelihood function for the bird?
As a trivial case, you can just say: Does the spectrum look like a bird? Then you’d have a digital channel by your definition for a single bit.
The actual channel bandwidth is obviously higher than that.
socsa@piefed.social · 2 pts · 350d
Yes you could likely design an optimized modulation scheme to do this, likely some kind of bird specific frequency shift keying. You can also do any kind of quadrature modulation in the audio spectrum (original dialup used acoustic modems).
This person just didn't do that in this case. It's still a very cool experiment by YouTube maker standards though.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 350d
My point is that it doesn’t have to be optimal to be considered digital. Which in the general case means basically any communication channel can be digital.
If the argument is that they didn’t correctly calculate the bandwidth, then sure.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
I dunno how you'd use check digits with a bird, but this seems the obvious way to deal with corruption. Or maybe give the bird more treats.
abruptly8951@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 350d
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?
gozz@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 350d
The whole sequence is:
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:
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.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 350d
These steps are literally the same thing. You’re converting some data into sound for the bird to hear.
Edit: Actually, most physical modulation schemes use sinusoids anyways. So that’s exactly the same as playing a spectrum.
gozz@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
Yes, the near-identical sentences (only drawing a distinction between the processes where one exists) would indicate that. The "heard by the bird" and "reproduced by the bird" steps were also the same. But this is necessary context to make clear the digital data ("bit-stream") that is being modulated into the signal.
It is far from "exactly the same". The similarity is only in that both go through the same analogue channel. The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly, while the spectrogram cannot.
The article title says they converted a PNG and the bird was able to "recall the file", and yet it produced an indisputably different file. That it looks vaguely the same to the cursory human observer does not make it the same file.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 350d
But this isn’t true. Just because a signal is modulated doesn’t mean it can’t be distorted.
A spectrogram is just showing that arbitrary data can be sent though this channel. It’s literally a form of modulation.
gozz@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 349d
I suppose you have caught me out slightly lacking in precision or pedantry. A digital to analogue modulation scheme is able to exactly reconstruct the original digital signal within the design tolerances for noise and distortion. Yes, eventually a signal may degrade or be corrupted, but prior to that point the reproduction is literally and exactly perfect. That exactitude is just about the definition of a digital system. This bird system is incapable of reproducing the input image of the bird exactly. It is not a digital communication system, unless you consider the "PNG" of the bird to have not been the message being carried.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 349d
I thought we were being pedantic here?
Modulation schemes are characterized via a probabilistic tolerance, so even when you are within the tolerances, you can get an incorrect value at some expected rate. Note that you can even define a modulation scheme with a high error rate and be ok with that.
That’s why I take issue with the concept of an exactly perfect reproduction. Usually there are layers above the digital modulation to handle these possibility to decrease the error rates even lower.
And no, I don’t consider the PNG to be the data carried. I think the way the author does the bandwidth calculations is incorrect.
Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 350d
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.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 350d
Every signal is ultimately analog. Voltage along a wire, sound, light, the world is analog and it all needs to be converted into our concept of digital (which is typically binary values).
salty_chief@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 351d
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
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 351d
WW what? Which WW? I HAVE to know!
toynbee@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 351d
Thus far, there mainly seem to be two options.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 351d
We'll have another option soon.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works · 19 pts · 351d
Me, everytime I see a bird:
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 351d
better than me:
Cocopanda@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 350d
Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!
whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 350d
They're just covering up the truth of the time cube
Rakonat@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 350d
Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.
Beero@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
Latency tho....
magikmw@piefed.social · 11 pts · 351d
The video is by Benn Jordan, I wholeheartedly recommend this video and entire channel. Guy is a world treasure.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca · 11 pts · 350d
Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫
InvalidName2@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 351d
While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.
lime@feddit.nu · 6 pts · 351d
not that kind of bird
Hatsune_Miku@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 350d
back to carrier pigeons?
destroyer@lemmy.cafe · 3 pts · 350d
WindyRebel@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 350d
What if I have bird blindness and I try and teach it to a duck?
markstos@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 350d
Ducks? That’s quackery.
digger@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 350d
What's the deal with the parrot?
SabinStargem@lemmy.today · 8 pts · 350d
?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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 350d
for now....
staph@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 350d
Fun speculation: we are CPUs for the information systems we inhabit, like scientific method, political ideologies, etc.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
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.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
Fuckin computers taking birds' jobs.
biofaust@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 350d
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.
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 351d
B I R D S A R E N T R E A L
Cort@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 351d
Yep, obviously a government funded drone if it only has 2Mb uplink
orenj@lemmy.sdf.org · 5 pts · 350d
How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?
Jankatarch@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 350d
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.)
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 350d
They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation
dsilverz@calckey.world · 5 pts · 350d
@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).
Goretantath@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 351d
So a moving target of data you cant reliably recall and might get shot by someone looking for food. At least its neat though.
brsrklf@jlai.lu · 8 pts · 351d
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.
nyan@lemmy.cafe · 3 pts · 350d
There will be a lot of cases where the data gets accidentally encapsulated (then fragmented due to incompatible protocols) in a cat.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 350d
Who on earth is gonna shoot a starling for food?
Have you seen starlings? They can fit in the palm of your hand.
altphoto@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 350d
I got the error correction baseball bat!
Joeyowlhouse@lemmy.wtf · 2 pts · 350d
I heard the Falcon service is the fastest.
axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafe · 2 pts · 350d
Make it an account on Twitter (I refuse to call that thing X)
guynamedzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 350d
Closest I’ll do is call it Xitter (pronounced zitter)
FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 350d
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.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 350d
Send a raven.
INeedMana@piefed.zip · 0 pts · 351d
@Sony@lemmy.world