Oct 17 2010

Benoît Mandelbrot, R.I.P.

Tag: 01Joaquim Anguas @ 8:50 am

B. B. Mandelbrot

NYT

WIRED

Remembering Mandelbrot via

Mandelbrot Set

Wikipedia

Coastline paradox


Oct 13 2010

State of the art in e-discovery

Tag: Informática LegalJoaquim Anguas @ 5:03 pm

E-discovery services are at a point in which some currents are converging.
I find this article «Forensics or against?» puts things into the right context:

Broadly, however, a forensic collection is not required for most commercial litigation matters where there are no allegations of wrongdoing or fraud and / or where the parties have explicitly agreed the approach to collection of data and this does not include a forensic imaging process.»

I could not agree more. Every part in the equation has to add the right amount of value. Or get erased from it.


Oct 12 2010

Forensic Tecnologies Preview Day: Enterprise Forensics

Tag: Informática LegalJoaquim Anguas @ 8:38 pm

I attended presentations from Mr. Tim Miller, at business development from Paraben Corp. and Eric Thompson, founder and CTO at AcessData Corp.

Enterprise forensic systems acquire, consolidate, preserve and analyze corporate wide information to be used in possible litigation.

Both companies had previous standalone products and have evolved them to the enterprise arena.

Mr. Miller made a product oriented presentation, but raised good points on what the problems and best practices in the activity are.

He explained what his company calls “360º forensics”: the gathering of information in a pristine fashion from all kind of devices and focusing on what the persons do, not what devices involved in actions are.

In the core of their enterprise solution there’s a 3 tiers architecture:

– A hidden Monitoring Software that gathers all kind of information regarding users’ activity.
– A Central Authentication.
– A Captain Module.

I asked him if (how and why) evidence presented using their tools gets questioned in court. Mr. Miller answered yes, of course there’s some opposition to evidence against one. He pointed as factors that minimize the success of an opposition: the presentation of multidimensional, coherent information, less technical and more appealing to persons; and training (“good training creates good case law”).

Mr. Thompson on his side made a very close, honest presentation, adapting it to what we the audience asked and giving us a good share of details about the best practices on the setup and fine tuning of their product for the performance conscious user. He presented the new features added to version 3.2 of their product FTK.

They include:

–          Rewritten Processing Engine,
–          The ability to «merge case index» to speedup searches,
–          The ability to set up global filters, labels or columns,
–          The possibility to define custom carvings,
–          New improved email analysis and results presentation,
–          The ability to show the relevance of documents calculated by occurrence per size unit,
–          A web server based front end and
–          New logging of all the actions performed during the session.


Oct 12 2010

Forensic Tecnologies Preview Day: Email Analysis Systems

Tag: Informática LegalJoaquim Anguas @ 8:37 pm

I attended the conferences from Mr. Tom Balance, founder and CEO at Vound LLC and Mr. Martin Hermann from NH Service in substitution of Mr. Morgan Sheehy, COO at Nuix.

Mr Balance gave a firsthand approach to their products and was sincere and earnest. He presented his product, Intella, to be centered on email analysis; only email analysis.

From the acquisition of all kind of email stores; to the indexing, searching, tagging, blacklisting; to results presentation, he covered most of the more relevant features of the product.

I found especially interesting its ability to search and process by message-id, or MS metadata, like “author” or “contributor”.

Mr. Hermann presented a different kind of animal.

Nuix is a system that not only allows you to “ingest” and “digest” huge amounts of emails very fast, but also is able to integrate with major litigation support tools like CaseLogistix, ConcordanceRelativity, Ringtail or Access Data’s Summation among others. Of course, this comes to a price, but it is interesting to note that the company is adopting the trend to new business models with new licensing / service oriented proposals.


Oct 12 2010

Forensic Tecnologies Preview Day, Introduction

Tag: Informática LegalJoaquim Anguas @ 8:15 pm

Today I attended “Forensic Technologes Preview Day” held in Karlruhe, Germany, an overview of the state of the art by some of the major players in the field.

I would like to thanks the organizers MH Service for the initiative and specially to Jan for his help before and during the event.

With at least 50% of the attendees being from law enforcement, product demonstration and presentations had some focus to their needs.

There’s also an emerging trend to move forensically sound practices inside the enterprise.

While some providers’ concentrate on horizontal solutions, like Paraben’s  P2 Enterprise or AccessData’s Access Data Enterprise for example, others see vertical approaches and specialization as their core value.

I am not inclined myself to use the term “forensics” widely because of the dissonance between the original meaning of the term (“of or before the forum”, recently “legal” or “related to courts” (see here) and the meaning we find lately: scientific or engineering techniques or activities oriented to derive facts from evidences. Deriving facts from evidences is a matter of interest for legal systems, but also for investigators, auditors and computer security professionals in our context. In my humble opinion mixing disciplines is not recommended. Anyway…

I had the opportunity to share experiences with some law enforcement officers. They pointed me to a Linux distribution I wasn’t aware of: grml. It is not primarily intended for forensic acquisition or analysis, but it looks like it deserves an in depth evaluation. I’ll let you know.

I want to share some comments regarding the presentations in following posts.


Oct 10 2010

Economies of scale

Tag: Informática LegalJoaquim Anguas @ 1:59 pm

If 18th century saw the birth of new ways to produce goods that were later to be referred to as «industry», 2010 is seeing the emergence of a new trend in litigation targeting and management.

Applying economies of scale to litigation is not new, but making it a business model is.

Law firms in UK and USA are taking advantage of the process set in their jurisdictions to help copyright holders getting back the supposed gain they should have got from people making use of P2P technologies to get their work for free.

Continue reading «Economies of scale»


Oct 07 2010

The Redbook

Tag: Informática LegalJoaquim Anguas @ 1:27 pm

The Redbook

I’ve just received this very desired book.

From the first line in the «Introduction»:

«The law,» as William Prosser once said, «is one of the principal literary professions.»

That makes a good start for me.

I’ll write a review of the book once I read it.

It’s been a long time since my last post. Pre-holidays time was a busy time because of closing; after-holidays is being very busy because of new cases.