A new law in Georgia on private investigators now extends to computer forensics and computer incident response, meaning that forensics experts who testify in court without a PI license may be committing a felony.

Coverage at Security Focus.

Forensic felonies

The Vatican is preparing to publish a statement on the use of condoms by people who have Aids, a senior Roman Catholic official has said.

'Bout time... AIDS in Africa is a far more immediate emergency then the western culture war over sexual morality. The later cannot be resolved quickly, the former must be. Although, at this point it may be too little, too late.

Vatican 'may relax condom rules'

The choice is either to be stampeded into a reckless adventure profoundly damaging to long-term U.S. national interests or to become serious about giving negotiations with Iran a genuine chance to be productive. The mullahs were on the skids several years ago but were given a new burst of life by the intensifying confrontation with the United States.

American policy should not be swayed by a contrived atmosphere of urgency ominously reminiscent of what preceded the intervention in Iraq.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

Do not attack Iran - International Herald Tribune

The bill would increase penalties for small-scale, noncommercial copyright infringement beyond even their current excessive levels. For example, noncommercial distribution of copyrighted material worth $2500 or more would carry a maximum sentence of ten years in Federal prison. Even attempting to commit that level of infringment would potentially carry a ten-year sentence. That’s the same maximum sentenced faced by bribe-taking Congressman Duke Cunningham, whose corruption probably cost taxpayers millions of dollars. It’s also more than the average Federal sentence for manslaughter (33 months), sexual abuse (73 months), arson (87 months), fraud (14 months), embezzlement (7 months), bribery (10 months), or racketeering/extortion (72 months).

I got $10 that Marsha Blackburn cosponsors this intolerable act.

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » U.S. Copyright May Get Harsher and Broader

Compuware pulls the plug. All I can do is laugh, and say go ollydbg!

(A shame. I hope they open the source...)

RIP Softice

Do you remember the recent thread about treating waiters well, and how it relates to character?

Well, when USA Today ran the article, they provided Bill Swanson's list of management truisms.

Turns out they're not his, after all.

William H. Swanson has become something of a management guru thanks to "Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management." It is a compilation of folksy business advice from Mr. Swanson, the chief executive of Raytheon, that the company distributes as a free booklet. No. 3 in his list of 33 rules begins: "Look for what is missing."

What is missing from Mr. Swanson's 76-page booklet, as an engineer discovered last week, is any reference to what appears to be the source of many of his rules: the 1944 book "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering" by W. J. King, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Swanson's Rules" are provided below. You'll notice several also appear in Rumsfeld's Rules.

1: Learn to say, "I don't know." If used when appropriate, it will be used often.
2: It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.
3: If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much
4: Look for what is missing. Many know how to improve what's there; few can see what isn't there.
5: Presentation rule: When something appears on a slide presentation, assume the world knows about it and deal with it accordingly.
6. Work for a boss to whom you can tell it like it is. Remember, you can't pick your family, but you can pick your boss.
7: Constantly review developments to make sure that the actual benefits are what they were supposed to be. Avoid Newton's Law.
8: However menial and trivial your early assignments may appear, give them your best effort.
9: Persistence or tenacity is the disposition to persevere in spite of difficulties, discouragement or indifference. Don't be known as a good starter but a poor finisher!
10: In doing your project, don't wait for others; go after them and make sure it gets done.
11: Confirm the instructions you give others, and their commitments, in writing. Don't assume it will get done.
12: Don't be timid: Speak up, express yourself and promote your ideas.
13: Practice shows that those who speak the most knowingly and confidently often end up with the assignment to get the job done.
14: Strive for brevity and clarity in oral and written reports.
15: Be extremely careful in the accuracy of your statements.
16: Don't overlook the fact that you are working for a boss. Keep him or her informed. Whatever the boss wants, within the bounds of integrity, takes top priority.
17: Promises, schedules and estimates are ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Raytheon Chief's Management Rules Have a Familiar Ring

New technology is "encouraging large-scale criminal enterprises to get involved in intellectual-property theft," Gonzales said, adding that proceeds from the illicit businesses are used, "quite frankly, to fund terrorism activities."

Willful attempts at piracy, even if they fail, could be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

But one of the more controversial sections may be the changes to the DMCA. Under current law, Section 1201 of the law generally prohibits distributing or trafficking in any software or hardware that can be used to bypass copy-protection devices. (That section already has been used against a Princeton computer science professor, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and a toner cartridge remanufacturer.)

Smith's measure would expand those civil and criminal restrictions. Instead of merely targeting distribution, the new language says nobody may "make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess" such anticircumvention tools if they may be redistributed to someone else.

When the Attorney General raises the specter of terrorism in the context of laws which primarily related to p2p file trading networks, its time to stop taking the Attorney General seriously. He is obviously not a serious person.

As for Lamar Smith, he is responsible for 2004's round of rock stupid DNS WHOIS legislation.

Congress readies DMCA ][

dc0de wrote:

For those of you who care about Computer Forensics, please see the current situation in Georgia.

There is a bill before the GA Legislature -- HB 1259

If passed, it will make it a Felony to perform and testify in a State Court about any computer forensics performed, unless you are a licensed Private Investigator.

Here is some more discussion of the issue. Here is the actual text of the legislation. The Atlanta High Technology Crime Investigation Association is holding a meeting on this subject on May 8th. Calvin Hill, Representative who sponsored the bill, and John Villanes, Chairman, Georgia Board of Private Detectives will be at the meeting.

Georgia Law to put Computer Forensics experts in Jail -- HB 1259

I’ve become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.

Mitch Kapor wants to change the political system.

This is interesting...

I've been thinking recently that the criminal justice system needs be reformed...

We have all these forensic scientists, lawyers, and other experts that we pay to prosecute people. Their job isn't to determine what happened. Their job is to convict people regardless of what happened. On the other side you have whatever counsel you can afford. The process is punative. Your only chance to get out unpunished if you go in is to funnel your life savings at a defense, as the government is unwilling to invest a similar amount of money in defense that they are in prosecution. (Which would be an obvious prerequisit for fair decision making in the process that we currently have.)

The ultimate goal of this system is to determine what happened, and yet no one is actually professionally responsible for that. To fill that role we pull random people off the street, and from that group we cull anyone who understands the subject matter at hand in the case or who has critical thoughts about the rules being enforced. The rules are created to sell an election bid to the sheep, rather than to produce a desireable sociological result. And despite the fact that judges have been removed from the process of determining guilt, they are still responsible for handing out punishments, something which they become numb to over the course of years...

And the crooks? We throw them into cells with eachother so they can fester together, harden, and organize. Its common knowledge that people get raped in prison. Is this a reasonable thing for our society to broadly accept? The products of the prison system are things like street gangs and neo nazis...

I have serious concerns about whether the system we have ever produces useful results. It seems obvious that its imbalance and mispriority can only produce useful results by chance. I can name many specific examples of cases where the results were detrimental.

Does anyone actually think about these things? Does anyone really analyze criminal judicial processes and pushiment systems and publish information about their effectiveness and about alternative architectures?

This is the kind of thing that humans are highly irrational about. These subjects are dominated by partisanship and pseudo-science in which the conclusions preceed the questions. This is the kind of space where we ought to have a lot of really smart people devoted to asking hard architectural questions in an objective fashion. Where are those people?

Mitch Kapor’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Movement for Fundamental Political Change

Congratulations to Elonka on making prime coverage in the New York Times ...

For nearly 16 years, puzzle enthusiasts have labored to decipher an 865-character coded message stenciled into a sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. This week, the sculptor gave them an unsettling but hopeful surprise: part of the message they thought they had deciphered years ago actually says something else.

On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Sanborn left a phone message for Elonka Dunin, a computer game developer who also runs an e-mail list for enthusiasts trying to solve the "Kryptos" puzzle. For the first time, Mr. Sanborn had done a line-by-line analysis of his text with what Mr. Gillogly and Mr. Stein had offered as the solution and discovered that part of the solved text was incorrect.

Within minutes, Ms. Dunin called back, and Mr. Sanborn told her that in the second section, one of the X's he had used as a separator between sentences had been omitted, altering the solution. "He was concerned that it had been widely published incorrectly," Ms. Dunin said.

Ms. Dunin excitedly started sending instant messages ...

A Break for Code Breakers on a C.I.A. Mystery