Wednesday, January 28, 2009

litsupport summary for the week ending on 01/25/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Nothing of permanent technological value?
A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner (mkerzner@top8.biz) and edited by Aline Bernstein (aline.bernstein@gmail.com).

litsupport summary for the week ending on 01/18/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. How reliable is MD5 or other hash signatures, in view of recent findings?
A. 
  • Security researchers were able to generate MD5 collisions and use them to forge SSL certificates. This means that two different files had the same MD5 signatures. It took a lot of computing power and research effort;
  • MD5 can still be used for deduping, since manipulating MD5 for deduping requires to much effort, and hiding the data can be achieved in other, easier ways;
  • MD5 collision can potentially be used to hide key evidence, by replacing the contents of the file and giving it the same MD5 signature, but this forgery also can be detected, or done in other, simpler ways – if one wants to take the risk of forging altogether;
  • currently SHA1 is considered more secure and can be used without objections, if computational resources allow it.

Q. Inexpensive and reliable OST to PST conversion software ?
A. 
  • http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpff/ 
  • http://www.transend.com/ 
  • http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/exchange-ost-recovery.html 
  • Review the OST file natively in PST Walker http://www.pstwalker.com 
  • OfficeRecovery  http://www.officerecovery.com/

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

Monday, January 12, 2009

litsupport summary for the week ending on 01/11/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.


Q. Free or low-cost software utilities for litsupport education and use?
A. Here are some of the most popular:
  1. http://www.philweldon.com/ - a complete list;
  2. Robocopy (Robust File Copy) - Command Line File Copier
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy (for utility see page's External Links section);
  3. Teracopy;
  4. 7 zip - open source zip;
  5. jZip - a free WinZip alternative;
  6. Bulk Rename Utility;
  7. Audacity - Digital Audio File Editor;
  8. BackStreet Browser - Free Offline Browser / WebSite Downloader;
  9. Slice Audio File Splitter;
  10. eLawExchange;
  11. Irfanview;
  12. CaseMakerX - a social network for law students and lawyers, free legal research.
Q. Uber-quick informal EDD processing survey.A. Survey results.


This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner (mkerzner@top8.biz) and edited by Aline Bernstein (aline.bernstein@gmail.com).

litsupport summary for the week ending on 01/04/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. How reliable is MD5 in light of this new discovery that SSL certificates can be forged backed on MD5 collision?
A. There are different aspects to this:
  1. It is possible to find another file with different content and with the same MD5 signature, but it is computationally very hard and requires deep technological expertise;
  2. If somebody uses SHA1 or other more advanced signatures, or SHA1 in combination with MD5, it is impractical to hack it;
  3. MD5 can still be used for deduplication, since hacking this process is more unlikely than falsifying individual evidence file;
  4. Since documents are authenticated by litigants and not only by hash values, and since there are many experts and many copies floating around, falsification based on MD5 collision is far-fetched;
  5. The area is still open to research, since hash signatures are used to analyze emails and other documents where byte-by-byte comparison is not adequate.
This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner (mkerzner@top8.biz) and edited by Aline Bernstein (aline.bernstein@gmail.com).

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Reason for current economic crisis

I think I know the reason for our current economic crisis. Let me illustrate it with a story, by way of example.

One morning I needed to find the phone of my doctor. I remembered full well that it comes up in the first page Google search results. If I just type his first and last name, then Houston TX, I get his phone address and phone. I usually misspell his name, but Google fixes that, suggests the correct spelling, and in fact shows the correct results anyway.

This morning, however, I did not want to wake my family members in any of the rooms that had a computer and I called 1411 on AT&T. I was greeted by an answering machine that asked for city and state. Then it asked the for business name, only to transfer me to the operator.

The operator, it has to be mentioned, knew what I was looking for, but he could not spell it. After a few attempts at spelling, he transfered my to another operator. This lady said that there was no such listing. When I told her that I had this number yesterday, she asked for the business name. I knew the name of this business office much less that the doctor's name. And I did not know the exact address either, so I could not help her. I hanged up after 15 minutes of wasting theirs and mine time.

Now, if any one of them looked it up on Google, they would have the answer, and the spelling problems would be resolved by Google also. But it must be a matter of pride for the telephone company to not allow them to use Internet, and they had to use their slow, cumbersome, and inefficient system - and we found nothing. I am sure they have spent many millions building the system.

Now I can posit the reason. Since AT&T is paying their operators for the time, and the same result can be had free and fast on the Internet, AT&T is wasting its money. Eventually, they will have to fire somebody, possibly those same operators, or somebody else.

However, this is just one example. I am quite sure that there are many areas of industry where new ways of getting information and doing things are so much faster and cheaper than the old ones that those companies that don't or can't switch are bound to keep bleeding money and to eventually downsize or outright fail.

Moreover, it is happening fast, since in the today's world which is interconnected everything is happening at Internet speed. Already travel agents can't compete with online information access, and real estate agents are following soon.

The subprime crunch and the mortgage crisis are therefore not the reasons, but only the consequences. They were the last attempts to try to make money with old means, and the pile-up and the subsequent crash exacerbated the situation but did not cause it.

Is there anything that can be done? Really, no. Everything will somehow shrink and shed the fluff, the old generation will go away into retirement, and the new one which has grown up digitally will start from the low point to go up. But the good side is that going up will probably be as fast as going down.