Engineers Use Electrical Hum To Fight Crime

Granted, to catch bad fakes and casual deception, this probably works

But what's stopping someone now knowing this, and supplanting their own "hum" back into the right place from any recording make anywhere during the time they want to "pretend" to be recording in?

What's actually stopping them ripping out the hum entirely and replacing it with the hum of any arbitrary period of time? If it's in every recording, and you can spot it in, say, CCTV recordings (that use quite primitive recording equipment and compression methods), then it's also incredibly easy to detect and "fake" yourself.

Also, I don't believe it's as reliable as they make out. We'll find out as more cases use it and it will have to be challenged at some point but even speed-cameras that weren't entirely accurate got a lot of people in trouble and then had to be rescinded years later.

And, totally off-topic, it reminds me of my German teacher in school (I'm English, and we were taught German as an optional foreign language). He basically begged me to take his class instead of Double Science, many moons ago, and even called me a "rat" at a parent's evening in front of my dad when I said I wasn't going to study German any more. Turns out he was kinda hoping I'd take German so he could up the average result a bit.

Two years later, he was sacked because the audio recordings of oral work that he sent off for the final exam had "clicks" on the tape (yes, tape!) in between every question where he'd obviously paused it and briefed the children on the right answer.

Wonder how they submit oral coursework now, with MP3's and things? It would be the work of a second to get a perfectly smooth recording of the same thing happening nowadays.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/yAFJFEhkiGg/story01.htm

jose canseco zimmerman derek fisher lyrid meteor shower hippocrates andrew breitbart red wings