Here we are! 2020 has just begun, and we’re releasing a brand new update to Amped Authenticate. Keep reading to find out what we’ve brewed for our loyal users.
Customizable Reporting
If you’re an Amped FIVE user, you’ve probably met this long-awaited feature a few weeks ago: now it is available in Amped Authenticate as well! We’re talking about the possibility of customizing the look and structure of reports generated at the end of your work. As soon as you click on the Generate Report button (under the Tools menu), you’ll be shown this window:
You’ll see we have a new Report Template dropdown menu, which allows you to select one of the Amped-prepared templates:
Happy New Year dear blog friends! Welcome to the first tip of 2020! Today we’re showing you a rather hidden functionality of Amped Authenticate: the possibility of loading and processing images using the command line interface! It’s something that comes pretty handy when you have to deal with a lot of files and want to save hundreds of clicks… keep reading to find out more!
2019 was a very busy and exciting year for Amped Software! We set up a new business entity in the USA and have an entirely new team there. We launched Amped Replay, a new product for investigators. And products continued to evolve with numerous updates. Learn all about this and more in this 2019 Year in Review post.
In January we launched our Tip Tuesday blog series full of tips and tricks to help our users get the most out of the Amped solutions they already own or have on their wish list! You can find all of these tips on our blog here. We’ll be adding more in 2020, so remember to subscribe to get these directly into your inbox.
Quite a big and important change happened in February. We established a new business entity and a new team in the USA to better serve our customers in North America. The new business entity is called Amped Software USA Inc. and is based in Brooklyn, New York, and is a fully owned subsidiary of Amped SRL, the Italian headquarters. Our goal is to now work more closely with our customers in the USA and Canada and to offer them the level of professionalism and consistency that we at Amped Software have tried to foster throughout the world. So, for all software sales and training in North America, please remember to contact us through the new business entity above.
In February we also released Amped FIVE 12727 which included Timeline, Multiview, HEIC support and more. Read more about this update here and watch the video to see the new features in action.
Official Amped Software training courses for 2020, delivered worldwide, are already filling up! Book your seat now to guarantee your attendance at one of the upcoming classes – we will be adding more dates and locations soon!
Please note that official Amped Software training courses are only those listed on our website and conducted by Amped Software personnel. We do not endorse or certify other people or companies to perform training on our products.
We provide the following courses in the USA, Canada, Italy and at customer premises worldwide:
Forensic Image and Video Enhancement with Amped FIVE
This course is recommended for users who recently purchased Amped FIVE and for those who want to gain hands-on experience from Amped officials trainers. Students will learn the fundamentals of image and video analysis and the issues faced when using digital multimedia evidence in investigations. The course is a mixture of lecture and hands-on with many practical exercises to solve real or simulated cases using Amped FIVE. Students will obtain the knowledge and skills required to properly analyze and process images and videos with a workflow compatible with forensic needs and constraints.
Amped FIVE Additions
This is a new and evolving course designed for analysts previously trained in Amped FIVE. Due to the speed of development at Amped Software, it has been identified that within 12 – 18 months, a user may require a ‘top-up’ to their training. This is a refresher course that allows users to better understand the newly released filters and functionalities of Amped FIVE to ensure the correct interpretation of data and learn to use the new tools to their full advantage. During the course, we look at advanced techniques and concepts for some of the original filters, such as aspect ratio correction and photogrammetry. In addition, we also look at particular cases and discuss, view and analyze challenges faced in forensic image and video analysis. The course is designed on a modular system, allowing a bespoke personalized schedule dependent on when the original training was received.
Forensic Image Analysis with Amped Authenticate
This course is recommended for users who recently purchased Amped Authenticate and for those who want to acquire training in the techniques necessary to perform authentication analysis on digital images in a forensic science setting as well as to package, deliver, and present those findings in court. The course is a mixture of lecture and hands-on. Students will obtain the knowledge and skills required to properly analyze digital images with a workflow compatible with forensic needs and constraints.
Dear Amped blog readers, welcome to this week’s tip! Today we’re dedicating some room to a simple yet very effective trick that can make Amped Authenticate reports more comprehensive and clear. We’ll see how we can effectively add screenshots to our project and comment on them, in such a way that they appear in the report helping to build up the story. Keep reading to find out more…
Dear friends, welcome to this Tip Tuesday! It’s a rather anomalous one, indeed, since we’ll not show any trick about using a specific Amped solution as usual. But we’ll still provide you with a very good tip: we’ll guide you through some of the freely available datasets you can find online, that you can use to test and validate our Amped FIVE, Amped Authenticate, Amped Replay, and Amped DVRConv. Yes, you’ve read correctly! There is lots of data out there that you can use to make your own experiments and increase your confidence in our software reliability. Keep reading to find out.
Dear Amped blog readers, welcome! This week’s tip is dedicated to a rather hidden feature of Amped Authenticate: the possibility to use TSV (Tab-Separated Values) as the output format for the Smart Report and Batch Processing tools, instead of the classical HTML format. All those thinking “why should we even care?!”, raise your hands! I see many of you! Keep reading to find out why this feature could be way more important than you think.
When we talk about Amped Authenticate, you may automatically think of its use in detecting forged and manipulated images such as those created using editing software to portray a different scenario or message from that of the original purpose of the image, and you’re certainly right about that (particularly in the age of the ever-prevalent ‘fake news’). The great thing about Amped Authenticateis that it’s also so much more on top of forgery detection – identify image processing history from capture to publish, extract images from documents, provide camera ballistics, but, in my view most importantly, add more weight to your child sexual exploitation, or CSE, investigations with all these tools and ultimately safeguard vulnerable children.
I always think of Authenticate as the tool I wish I’d had during my time examining mobile devices and computers, now realizing its potential to further solidify my cases and digital evidence, least of all because of the seamless integration with Griffeye Analyze. As digital forensics investigators, the majority of our work involves CSE material and recovering evidence from a multitude of devices to prove or disprove the offense in question, and the more evidence we can provide the more likely we are to achieve a successful prosecution or clear an innocent party – we keep an open and unbiased mind as forensics professionals, as always.
The PRNU, or photo response non-uniformity (also known as camera ballistics), capabilities of Authenticate are often under-utilized by law enforcement digital forensics professionals – I admit, I didn’t realize it had such a tool and how useful it could be in my work at the start of my career! Let’s take a safeguarding investigation as an example, often unpleasant cases in which a child has been exploited. We know law enforcement and governments around the world have similar methods of tracking illegal images and videos, usually through databases, in order to identify such material quickly and to avoid unnecessary exposure of traumatic material to investigators, but these safeguarding cases often involve newly generated images, not stored in any database.
Dear friends, thanks for coming here for this week’s Tip Tuesday! Today we are dealing with a basic feature of Amped Authenticate that often gets overlooked during our training courses, but it really shouldn’t be. I’m talking about the possibility of adjusting levels to get a better Visual Inspection of your evidence image. Keep reading and you’ll see how it can be useful.
Dear Tip Tuesday aficionados, welcome to this brand new tip! Today we’re dealing with Amped Authenticate, the most complete software for image integrity and authenticity analysis you can find out there. If you installed the latest, recent update, you may have noticed that a lot of new features were added. But there’s one thing we worked on a whole lot and we really don’t want you to miss: the totally renewed and enriched Samples Folder. This tip will show you why that folder is definitely worth a look.
