Best Practices for Seizing Electronic Evidence, manual by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the United States Secret Service:

Computers and digital media are increasingly involved in unlawful activities. The computer may be contraband, fruits of the crime, a tool of the offense, or a storage container holding evidence of the offense. Investigation of any criminal activity may produce electronic evidence. Computers and related evidence range from the mainframe computer to the pocket-sized personal data assistant to the floppy diskette, CD or the smallest electronic chip device. Images, audio, text and other data on these media are easily altered or destroyed. It is imperative that law enforcement officers recognize, protect, seize and search such devices in accordance with applicable statutes, policies and best practices and guidelines.

[h/t DJ Technocrat]

I’ve recently abandoned my pre-Ubiwar protoblogging persona, but was trawling through some old posts and found the following, duly edited for contemporary purposes:

An article by Michael Agger in Slate, Le Browser: saluting Jean Baudrillard, is an affectionate tribute to the deceased French provocateur. It includes this passage, quoted from America (1988):

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning with death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with machine.

Although not quoted in the article, the next sentence is:

This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic.

See, I find that funny. I’m sure people took Baudrillard too seriously. Too literally as well, if the incredible furore over his ‘the Gulf War did not take place’ thesis is any yardstick.

The University of California at San Diego has announced a ‘groundbreaking’ study to determine How Much Information? there is in the world. Extracts from the press release:

The “How Much Information?” study will be completed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university faculty team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship. The program will be undertaken at the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), with support from the Jacobs School of Engineering and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

“Experts say that we live in an information economy, but how much information is there, and do countries count and value information comparably? The previous generation of studies have reported information as countable bits and bytes, and documented large growth numbers” said IR/PS Dean Peter F. Cowhey. “The next generation of studies will count more precisely the impacts and implications of information growth, and do this internationally,” continued Cowhey.

“We have designed this research as a partnership between industry and academics to take the next steps in understanding how to think about, measure, and understand the implications of dramatic growth in digital information,” said Professor Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, co-leader of the new program. “As the costs per byte of creating, storing, and moving data fall, the amounts rise exponentially. We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.” Bohn’s co-leader, Dr. James Short, noted that recent industry studies have reported larger and larger amounts of information being produced and stored in networks, companies and homes. “We will continue to document the growth in information,” Short said, “but at the end of the day we are studying how information works. How information works is about measuring and counting the uses and applications driving the massive increases in networking and data growth, allowing businesses and consumers to use information more effectively to make better decisions.”

Updates on the research will be announced over the course of the next three years, with the initial report slated for publication at the end of 2008. For more information and to view updates on the research, please visit http://giic.ucsd.edu.

The ‘previous generation of studies’ presumably includes the recent International Data Corporation report, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011 [.pdf], to which I’ve referred before. Their research concluded that in 2007 the ‘digital universe’ consisted of 281 exabytes of data (281 billion gigabytes), 10% higher than forecast. By 2011, the total volume - if that is the right word - of data will be ten times it was in 2006.

Big numbers, but nothing close to the postulated total amount of information in the universe. If current trends continue (and I’m ignoring a few variables here, admittedly) there will be no space in the universe for our ever-increasing data production by about AD 2650 (according to Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman).

Nicholas Carr quotes from an article by BBC journalist Bill Thompson in Miasma Computing:

The metaphor of “the cloud” is a seductive one, but it’s also dangerous. It not only suggests that our new utility-computing system is detached from the physical (and political) realities of our planet, but it also lends to that system an empyrean glow. The metaphor sustains and extends the old idealistic belief in “cyberspace” as a separate, more perfect realm in which the boundaries and constraints of the real world are erased.

Bill Thompson raises a warning flag:

Behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the “cloud” is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and every network interaction connects two locations in the real world … In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

Now there’s a metaphor. I’m guessing, though, that the marketers aren’t going to allow “miasma computing” into our vocabulary. It’s kind of a downer.

Nicholas goes on to say:

The metaphor of “the cloud” seems to have been derived from those schematic drawings of corporate computing systems that use stylized images of clouds to represent the Internet - that vast, ill-defined digital mass that lies beyond the firewall. Those drawings always reminded me of the ancient maps of the known world, the edges of which were marked with the legend “Beyond Here There Be Dragons.”

The dragons are stirring.

These are wise words - I strongly believe the ‘virtual’ is the ‘real’, not the ‘Other’. In a previous blog incarnation I wrote something I titled Metaphor: Nature in Cyberspace, and thought I’d post it here again to see if I broadly agree with what I wrote back in March 2007. And (with some reservations) I think I do. Anyway, here it is:

I sure as hell don’t understand the science behind this, but if the scalability problems can be resolved this seems like significant news to me:

Scientists have built the first living computer and tasked it with solving an important problem: flipping pancakes.

Researchers genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing a classic mathematical puzzle known as the burned pancake problem. Molecules of DNA have the natural ability to store and process information, and scientists have been performing computations with bare DNA molecules in lab dishes since the mid-1990s. But the new research, reported online in the Journal of Biological Engineering, is the first to do DNA computation in living cells.

“Imagine having the parallel processing power of a million computers all in the space of a drop of water,” says Karmella Haynes, a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina. “It’s possible to do that because cells are so tiny and DNA is so tiny.”

Read the rest at Science News or the article abstract here.

From The Economist:

The broadband myth: To what good, these high-speed links?

IN 1987 Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, famously said: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” It was only in 2003 that The Economist felt comfortable boldly proclaiming: “The ‘productivity paradox’ has been solved.”

As Dr Solow observed, most countries saw productivity growth slow in the 1980s and early 1990s, just as computers were becoming widely used. Techies grumbled, economists sharpened their pencils—and businessmen ignored the argument and went on buying the kit. But the conclusion was clear: new technologies on their own do not raise productivity. Rather, companies and individuals must figure out how to make best use of them in order to reap their rewards.

Read the rest here.

Faster Wireless Networks: sending descriptions of data could be more efficient than sending the data itself, by Duncan Graham-Rowe at MIT Technology Review:

The role of computer networks would appear to be fairly straightforward: to ferry data from one point to another. But a novel wireless-network protocol developed for the U.S. military breaks with this tradition by sending not the data itself but rather a description of the data. In simulations, a network using the protocol was five times more efficient than a traditional network. Within the next year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will test the protocol in field trials at Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia.

The protocol is part of a project to create a new generation of mobile ad-hoc networks - self-configuring networks of mobile wireless nodes - that will enable faster and more reliable tactical communications between military personnel and vehicles, says Greg Lauer, section head for advanced network systems at BAE Systems in Burlington, MA, which helped develop the protocol for DARPA.

But the project also demonstrates the potential of a new and exciting field called network coding, says Muriel Médard, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who collaborated on the project with BAE Systems.

Read the rest of this fascinating article here.

I’ve long been sceptical of the One Laptop Per Child program. Not because they don’t have laudable aims to provide connectivity to developing countries but because they’ve been concentrating on the wrong technology. This article by Paul Lamb at ComputerWorld sums up the real issues:

The folks at One Laptop Per Child deserve a lot of credit for raising awareness around the global digital divide. Their stylish green laptop, along with the accompanying goal of putting 21st-century technology in the hands of children in developing countries, has captured the imaginations of people, companies and governments worldwide.

But the nearly half-million orders received from developing countries thus far for the so-called $100 laptop suggests that this effort to supply the developing world with affordable PCs may be too late.

That’s because the developing world has been swept up in the mobile voice revolution, which has far outpaced the spread of desktop and laptop computers. Global mobile phone users number nearly 3 billion, and 1.3 billion of those users are able to access the Internet using their handheld devices. That compares with roughly 1.1 billion desktop users with Web access worldwide.

And it is estimated that by 2010, half the world’s population will have mobile Internet access, while the growth in desktop and laptop computers is expected to remain fairly flat.

Not that the current generation of cell phones can do everything a desktop or laptop can do, but with the emergence of the iPhone and efforts to create an open application environment for handsets, we are moving rapidly in that direction. Add in increasing mobile storage capacity, voice-activated search and the ability to project images and keyboards anywhere on the fly, and it will only be a matter of time before anything we want to do on a desktop can be done just as easily on a handheld device.

And in the developing world, where the mobile phone market is growing phenomenally, and where nearly a third of the population is illiterate, cheap laptops may not be the best answer.

A cheap phone with Web access and locally relevant applications may be a better driver for bringing the developing world online. Phones are much simpler to use, allow people to leverage voice as a preferred means of communication and are certainly easier and safer to carry. Mobile banking, which allows the majority of people who are too poor to have a traditional bank account, to safely move and store money via cell phones, has caught on like wildfire in Africa, the Philippines and many other developing nations. In India, one-third of cell phone owners access the Internet only through their handheld devices.

It would only seem good sense to build on the current mobile explosion in developing regions, leapfrogging the PC. By offering enhanced cell phone devices — equipped with simple-to-use productivity and education tools — we may be able to reach many more people much faster than current PC digital inclusion efforts allow.

So as much as One Laptop Per Child is a good idea, it may be time to rethink our approach to helping the remaining 80% of the world come online and adopt 21st-century technologies. One BlackBerry Per Child may sound like a ludicrous notion, but so did a global distribution of cheap laptops just a few short years ago.

I would add that the energy savings would be immense too, although that’s a presumption on my part. I can charge my phone with an inexpensive solar charger, which isn’t great, but that’ll change too. Compare that to an always-on PC. Go somewhere horrendously deforested like Malawi and factor in the additional ecological damage needed to fuel the next generation of laptops, however resource-light they are.

I’ve seen a lot of great projects - by NGOs, academics and individuals - utilising cellphones in ways we would probably not have imagined five years ago. Certainly, the microcredit angle really surprised me when I first encountered it in Kenya and Uganda in 2005 (two years previously when I was there, the software credit-transfer mechanisms were not readily available). And the cellphone companies are facilitating it too - it’s good business for them, and it’s good business for their (usually pay-as-you-go) customers. You don’t need a flashy model either - people are hacking the hell out of even the most beat-up models.

I’ve stopped taking my laptop out of the house. Now it sits in the living room as a second, more mobile PC. When I go out, I take my phone instead. I mean Mobile PC, because that’s what it really is. It’s rubbish as a phone, but great as a browsing, downloading, emailing tool (although, hurry up Firefox Mobile). At a pinch I can even take notes on it. I’m too much of an eejit to be able to do half the things it could but I guarantee you that people in Kampala, Kurdistan and Kashmir are squeezing every sweet, connective, inventive drop out of theirs.

And from the folks at e2save is this rocking little history of the mobile phone, with a glimpse into the future too:

It’s highly unlikely that I’ll have the chance to mention Canada twice in a day for some time, even with the Stanley Cup coming up, so here goes.

Alfred Hermida reports that Canada’s broadcast watchdog, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is undertaking a public consultation exercise on how it should deal with the internet, in particular whether it should extend regulatory oversight to the medium.

As part of its public consultation, the CRTC released a 75-page report (.pdf) on research and attitudes to the Internet that provides some insight into how the media landscape is changing in Canada.

The report frames the debate in terms of preserving and promoting “Canadian content in a global new media broadcasting environment”. The CRTC is approaching the Internet as a broadcast medium, much like television or radio. This reveals a fundamental misconception of the net, as it is not less of a one-to-many and more of a many-to-many medium. But the public consultation is framed within the notion of the net as another form of broadcast…

However, Canadian media organisations would do well to take notice of how audiences are changing. The CRTC report found that high-speed residential Internet access is now available to 93% of households across the country and has been adopted by more than 60% of Canadian households.

It will come as no surprise that youngsters lead the way. According to the CRTC report:

* In 2006, 91% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 accessed the Internet, compared to only 69% of Canadians aged 55 or older.
* In December 2006, approximately 30% of Canadian adults online connected for more than 10 hours per week. This compares to 52% for young Canadian adults aged 18 to 24.
* Canadians under 18 now spend roughly the same amount of time online as they do watching TV - between 15 and 17 hours).

Clearly a shift is taking place in media consumption, so a debate on Canada’s approach to new media is timely. People have until July 11 to file comments, and the CRTC plans to hold public hearings in early 2009.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports on a curious use of virtual worlds in the educational context:

Even as some panic about the possibility of terrorist exploitation of Second Life, a program in Canada is using the virtual world to catch people at the border.

Loyalist College in Ontario has created a virtual simulation of a US-Canada border crossing, enabling students to practice quizzing travelers about their backgrounds. The program is one of several at the school that uses virtual worlds technology, including sims that teach prison guards and journalists. Almost ten percent of the student body has used Second Life in the course of their schoolwork.

One big draw for Loyalist is the low cost of building in a virtual world — no consultants were hired to build the simulations. “We figured out early the way to make it efficient is to do everything ourselves,” said Ken Hudson of the school’s Virtual World Design Centre. Hudson works with five part-time designers to build and maintain the simulations, all of whom are graduates of the school’s animation program.

Here’s some footage from the ‘virtual border guard training’:

And I thought General Ripper was dead. This is bonkers …

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.

Carpet bombing as a deterrent? Infowar with a 3GW mentality? That’s USAF Col. Charles W. Williamson III in Armed Forces Journal.

Updated: Kevin Poulsen at Threat Level is equally unimpressed:

Basically, Col. Williamson has noticed that there are bad guys in the swimming pool, and his solution is to piss in their general direction. That’s the kind of behavior that rightly gets you kicked out of the pool and sent home for the summer.

Updated: Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has rather more time for the idea, albeit with reservations, and adds the following:

So while the article presents the military botnet idea mainly as a proposal for something that the Air Force should consider, one gets the feeling on reading it that this is more of a “speak now, or forever hold your peace” type moment for anyone in the public who objects to the idea…

“The biggest challenge will be political,” writes Williamson. “How does the US explain to its best friends that we had to shut down their computers? The best remedy for this is prevention. The US and its allies need to engage in a robust joint endeavor to improve net defense and intelligence to minimize this risk.”

Well, absolutely. Fighting DDoS with DDoS sounds a bit Old Testament to me. Let’s hope Williamson and his colleagues at AFCYBER can come up with schemes more sophisticated than require further analogies of the carpet-bombing variety. We really don’t need Napalm Pilots, for example.