Brian
First 2012 Discere Dev Update
My work on Discere continues. PST files have been supported for a while now, but lotus notes is the other half of the corporate email coin. Unfortunately, there are no cross platform open source libraries which support LotusNotes NSF files in pure java. Instead, I am using the IBM Domino API – unfortunately this requires Domino Designer to be installed which makes it a Windows solution. This is not optimal as I’ve been aiming for complete platform independence, but this may be a necessary evil for now.
As with my test metrics for PST files, the speed doing a native -> PDF conversion directly instead of using PDF/Tiff printer drivers etc is very promising. The test file I am developing against converted ~3.5k emails to PDF in less than 2 minutes. This currently does not handle attachments, but that will be fixed and attachments will be handled as per the native format just like Discere handles attachments in PST files.
Discere Dev Update
Discere is approaching a usable alpha release. I just need to add support for zip/jar/tar/etc archives, and incorporate my prior PST handler from black friar, then add rudimentary document tagging. Spreadsheets are still a bane – I don’t know what the point is really, they never come out in a readable format without human intervention; I’m wondering about rendering them from an HTML table extraction.
I thought I would just post the above dev log update since I have so little time to blog right now. As a quick explanation, Discere is a part of my dissertation work, and is a subset of my Blackfriar project. Discere is intended to be an eDiscovery / Document review system with robust index/search capabilities, while Black Friar is the overarching project linking digital forensic acquisition / preservation data into a reviewable / produce-able format. All of it relies on a substantial number of Open Source projects to leverage existing, robust projects into a tool usable by anyone. It is also cross-platform to address the increasing number of Mac and Linux systems found in the legal environment (trust me, half of my law school classmates are on macs right now, and I am noticing an increase in usage with clients I do expert work for).
Changes
Moving forward is never an easy decision, but sometimes we outgrow what we have, and must move to something new.
For me, it is time to move on from Venue Docket. I have been at Venue for over five years working with it and its sister companies, but now I find I must move on to move forward. For my clients, there will be no disruption to my services. I will be contacting you soon with updated information on my new company Digital Inquest, LLC.
One of the exciting opportunities this change brings is for me to expand my services to other clients I have been unable to work with in the past. I look forward to continuing my work with plaintiff firms who find themselves in eDiscovery disputes. I also look forward to doing more proactive work with defense firms dealing with issues from preservation through developing defensible search protocols. I feel that in the end, whether I am hired by a defense firm or a plaintiff firm, the ultimate goal is the same: understanding the problem, developing a solution, and delivering that solution in the most efficient manner possible.
NOPA Slides June 2011
I gave a presentation to the New Orleans Paralegal Association for their June 2011 meeting. The presentation was on differences between reality and crime genre movies and television shows like NCIS, CSI, Numb3rs, etc. The presentation contains a number of video clips from such shows, and has some information explaining where they were right, where they were wrong, and some of the problems with changing technology making previously impossible things possible.
*UPDATE* – One of my slides pokes fun at the “GUI Interface in Visual Basic” to track an IP address, and invalid IP addresses. This morning’s update to the long running BOFH ‘comic’ took a moment to poke fun at some of these same topics.
“Yes, but if you like we can use our television script based IT skills to determine who damaged these computers?”
“Well… yes, if you think it will work?” the Boss burbles.
“You bet. We’ll have it sorted inside the hour. Or 16 minutes if we don’t stop for adverts.”
“So you want me to run up a GUI interface using visual basic to track the killer’s IP Address?” the PFY asks.
“Yes do that – although we already know the first number in the address is 324 dot something.”
“Ah, so it’s from downtown,” the PFY nods knowingly.
Slide 9 Video – Utter nonsense
Slide 11 Video – Numb3rs IPv4
Slide 13 Video – Gaming Consoles & Spreadsheets
Slide 16 Video – NCIS Steganography
Slide 18 Video – Elements song; encoding lyrics into MP3
Slide 19 Video – Original vs Hidden comparison
Slide 21 Video – Fried phone
Slide 23 Video – Stuxnet
Slide 25 Video – You can always unplug
Social media, 3rd party data storage, and warrants
Just a quick post about this article which I came across this morning regarding warrants going after facebook data. This is a very interesting trend with both privacy as well as public policy implications for the continued advancement of technology. One of my colleagues, who I did some privacy and ethics writing with earlier this year, and I have been preparing a paper on the problems the border searches of laptops cause from a technology adoption perspective – essentially our argument in brief involves technology becoming more and more a form of external cognition, and such searches discourage the continued progress for fear of privacy violations.
The flip side of this argument, is technology is adaptive and the past has demonstrated a continued evolution of technical solutions to circumvent legal interference. The evolution of peer2peer networks from Napster to the Pirate Bay and beyond is particularly illustrative. Attempts by US corporations and ICE to shut down these systems have met with increasingly sophisticated adaptations – decentralization, distributed trackers, moves to DNS registrars and TLDs outside of US jurisdiction, encryption, private tracking and so forth.
The former, chilling effect on technology adoption, is more applicable to low technology users who are not competent to judge the measure of their privacy in an online ecosystem. The latter is more applicable to high technology users – early adopters with significant technical savvy and understanding of the implementation details these systems use. Low technology users are more apt to unwittingly void their privacy even if their expectations of it are objectively unreasonable or to not adopt the technology out of fear. High technology users are more likely to meet the legal challenges with technical solutions – like an immune system – to move the technical state of the art continuously ahead of the legal competence.
There is a paper in here somewhere, but that will have to wait until I return from my study abroad session and get back into work mode.