Digital Inquest

Information Ethics Roundtable 2012

Brian — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:02:44 +0000

Mikal and I worked up a presentation on smart devices for the Information Ethics Roundtable in New York at Hunter College. I presented our talk in April which consisted of our policy based interpretation of external cognition, and some hypotheticals on different interactions between actors. We will be refining the hypotheticals into a paper at some point this summer. The link to the slides are below.

Information Ethics Roundtable 2012

External Cognition and the Privacy of Smart Devices - Slides from my talk.

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Site Update

Brian — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:06:29 +0000

I’ve update the website theme, updated the about page, and added pages for services and contact.

Ethics paper goes to print!

Brian — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 04:51:19 +0000

Roux B and Falgoust M – “Ethical Issues Raised by Methods of Data Acquisition for Research in Digital Forensics” is now in print in Vol 21, No 1 in the Journal of Information Ethics (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/jie.html) – I got my author’s…

First 2012 Discere Dev Update

Brian — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 02:21:00 +0000

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

Brian — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:23:00 +0000

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).