If you’ve ever misplaced a phone or USB drive in your house and wished for a way to find it, a dog with a keen nose and a playful attitude could have helped you out. Fortunately, with skills like that, our canine friends are finding a much higher calling working with police, the FBI, and homeland security.
As devices improve, a tiny microSD the size of a fingernail and less than a millimeter thick can hold hundreds of gigabytes of data. With this advancement comes the tools for criminals to hide and transfer enormous amounts of information without even lifting a finger. Where does that leave the fine men and women tasked with staying one step ahead? In Ogden, Utah and across the United States, they are getting the edge with their friendly Labrador companions. Ogden is home to one of fewer than two dozen “Electronic Sniffing” dogs in the nation’s police force and his name is URL (pronounced “Earl”). URL sniffs out electronic media like flash drives, memory cards, and cell phones. While they’re not exactly cryptography experts, they are consistently able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss.
Starting around 2015 with a K-9 named Bear, investigations involving trafficking, pornography, and counterterrorism have had success with the sharp noses of the dogs alongside them. The dog’s expertise comes from playful, but rigorous training exercises and are on a food-reward diet. Dogs could be led to search an office piled to the ceiling with boxes, or an open field with evidence buried underground, and within minutes they will lead their handlers to the prize. What’s the secret? The common element between all these eletric devices is a circuitboard. Compounds are added to the board to help them deal with overheating and it’s this compound that officers train their K-9 partners with. Initially using large amounts and then all the way down to a standard thumb drive, the dogs familiarize the scent and the training to be able to search houses, vents, cars, and people if deemed necessary.
From detecting drugs, to explosives, and now to electronics, the utility of a canine’s senses can’t be understated. Craig Angle the co-director of the Canine Performance Sciences program at Auburn University said he’s seen dogs identify very small targets from incredible distances. “I’ve seen them detect two ounces of explosives from more than 300 yards away,” he said. “They can detect through barriers and masking agents. We see a lot of natural instincts in a dog’s ability to detect innate behaviors like understanding and utilizing wind currents and scent plume.” From a researcher perspective and from the law enforcement officers working with these animals, it’s clear that the full potential of cooperation like this has immense potential for evidence gathering in the future.
Since the posting of this original article, new information is available about “How Can I Delete the System Volume Information Folder?” and in addition we have tips on how to keep the System Volume Information folder off the USB Stick.
If you have a drive formatted from a Windows system, and you have your settings showing hidden files and folders, then a “System Volume Information” folder will appear with unclear contents and purpose. Why is it there? And how much space on your drive is it actually consuming?
Both Windows 10 and Windows 11 automatically create the System Volume Information folder on removable drives, and this folder is protected with strict permissions that block user access—even for administrators. Microsoft designed this folder to store metadata and system configuration files that help Windows manage indexing, restore points, and certain USB device interactions. Despite these intended functions, our testing on Windows 10 and Windows 11 showed that USB drives worked perfectly fine without the folder, even when storing different file types and large data sets. In most cases, deleting it or preventing its creation had no negative impact on drive performance or file integrity.
According to the Windows documentation, this folder is where certain behaviors are stored when creating a System Restore point but that doesn’t apply to all users and furthers the confusion as to why it would be located on a drive that is being used for other purposes. To minimize the useless space taken up on our drives, the first attempt was to shrink it through the Control Panel. Through the Control Panel > System and Security > System > System Protection, there are Protection Settings which can enable System Restore and control how much disk space Windows uses.
Unfortunately, shrinking it did not free up as much space as we were looking for so the next step was to find a way to get rid of it. Now since this is a Windows file, and Windows isn’t even too keen on letting us access the file, it doesn’t like the idea of deletion at all. After trying to find ways within the operating system to allow us to remove the file, we ended up looking at an outside option from Nexcopy whom we had worked with in the past. Their tool wasn’t built for deleting a single file but since we could just move our desired content back onto the drive after using their “Erase” function, and since it’s free, it ended up being a solid workaround. The end result? No more unruly folder and a useful software to keep around in case we find other unwanted files that our operating system won’t let us get rid of.
Microsoft is creating a new connection for their tablet and laptop devices but as revealed in their newest patent filing, the working version of its Surface connector port will resemble the magnetic snap of past Apple devices while maintaining current USB-C compatibility standards.
The world’s largest disk drive maker, with revenues exceeding $13 billion annually, has moved its headquarters to San Jose from Irvine.
According to the OC Business Council, the company has 1400 employees in Irvine and 200 in Santa Ana so while the designation of headquarters has changed, much of their operations for business management, engineering, and functional support will remain at the Irvine location. Additionally, the Enterprise SSD team, previously in Santa Ana, and teams like it will be moving to Irvine. The reason is said to be a prioritization of Orange County jobs as stated by Lucy Dunn, the president and chief executive of the Orange County Business Council but some aren’t sure of this.
With the 10th anniversary of the iPhone approaching, features and design for the celebratory version of the device have been leaked or rumored in the last week. According to various reports, at least one new model will be available with a curved OLED screen similar to that of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. This high end model, however, is estimated to sell for just over $1,000 and to be marketed as a premium option alongside the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.
Kingston Technology announced last week that it is shipping the most the world’s largest capacity USB drive from DataTraveler. Their Ultimate GT offers up to 2TB of storage and USB 3.1 Gen 1 (USB 3.0) performance. Tech enthusiasts and professional users with high-capacity storage needs will have the ability to store immense amounts of data in a portable form factor with use cases such as up to 70 hours of 4K video stored on the drive.
Representatives from Kingston have stated “We are always striving to create new and better storage solutions to meet our customers’ needs especially in an ever-increasing digital world.” With the release of the DataTraveler Ultimate GT, users can push the boundaries of their mobile storage needs and ensure that they have more than enough space to store their video, photos and files in the most portable medium available.
With the spark of uncertainty in various global markets after the events of the new year, not even the giants are able to get by unscathed. Toshiba’s board on Friday approved plans to make its core memory chip business a separate company for outside investment. With it goes more than just ownership, but private equity and investments in the specific sectors being split off.
Toshiba’s memory chip business is the world’s biggest NAND flash memory producer after Samsung, and it accounts for the bulk of Toshiba’s operating profits. The sale, however, is looking to sell roughly 20 percent of its holdings for over 200 billion yen. Aiming to complete the sale by the end of the financial year, Toshiba will announce the final figure for the writedown on February 14th when it reports third-quarter results.
With bootable USB media becoming more and more common and fewer machines even shipping with a CD drive, ISO image files and other forms of portable software is becoming the new standard for software distributions. To supplement this shift, Rufus aims to convert any ISO image into a boot drive in a matter of minutes.
Rufus is an easy to use portable software for Windows devices to create bootable USB drives using ISO images. This includes options to properly identify images such as installation disks or operating systems and then it will compare the image to the available disk size. The process itself does not take a particularly long time but it does depend on the size of the ISo and speed of the USB drive.
Rasberry Pi’s Pixel is a lightweight operating system released by the foundation behind the affordable $35 Rasberry Pi computer and it is now available for PC or Mac users who want to renew their old hardware! The Linux-based OS comes as a downloadable image you can either burn to a DVD or load onto a USB drive to boot directly into the Pixel environment.
What does this mean for your old laptop that has been lying around? It means you can once again use it for basic tasks and web browsing via Chromium, which comes pre-installed. This is, however, a prototype build. Some bugs and hardware compatibility issues are expected, one of which is a recognition error with modern Mac systems but altogether, nothing that would be harmful to your system. The creative prioritization was for the purpose of distributing this Mac and PC version because it was believed to be most useful in schools with outdated hardware. With Pixel, these machines will once again be able to access information in modern fashion.
For anyone looking for a PC mic, a USB connection is a must. Mic jack connections with the standard 3.5mm cable don’t have the connections or data flow to properly translate sound into usable data for a computer. To go beyond this, however, would be to use tools like Behringer’s new MIC500USB to achieve that famous tube “warmth” without having to record in a studio with rackmounted tube preamps.
In light of misinformation and explosively popular falsehoods we’ve seen in the last few years, Facebook has taken steps to create consequences for spreading objectionable content. This month the US Trademark and Patent Office published Facebook’s application for a detection tool on their platform. As stated in the application, its primary purpose is to improve detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying. Last month, however, Zuckerberg emphasized the need for “better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.”
The system described is largely consistent with Facebook’s current protocols for objectionable content but it also adds layers of machine learning to improve efficiency. The move comes at a time when Facebook is under increasing public pressure to reduce the spread of propaganda through its network. Although they have expressed commitment to making improvements, they are proceeding with caution to the idea that machine learning can separate fact from fiction but due to the audiences receptive to some of the more questionable content, clear standards may be the first necessary step for implementation.
Phishing emails and information theft as a whole can be frightening as well as annoying. They flood our inboxes hoping our guard is down and we make a mistake to give up our private details and it seems like a never ending battle against hackers and scammers. To combat this, here are a few easy steps that can keep your information secure.
