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FTK is useless for CDs and DVDs. It is focused on hard drive and thumb drives.

Check out http://www.infinadyne.com/cddvd_diagnostic.html - it recovers video directly. And we know how to deal with discs that do not mount because of a damaged lead-in.

Yes, we are going to be talking with the Santa Cruz DA and police about this.

I believe they were based on floppy discs. Remember, these came from 1980, not 1993 as the summary seems to suggest.

Check out the book at http://www.infinadyne.com/cddvdforensicsbook.html

AccuBurn-R http://www.infinadyne.com/accuburn-r.html automatically splits up files in a disc layout so you do not manually have to do it yourself and makes it easy to create a multi disc archive. It can be setup to do automatic backups as well. It does not use any proprietary technology to make the spanned disc archive so any of the discs can be easily read and used on almost any computer without the other discs from the archive or any special software. More information on how the disc archives work can be found here http://www.infinadyne.com/accuburn-rtech.html It is not free but it is not too expensive either at $41.99. I do work for Infinadyne but I thought I would mention the product since it is the only burning software to my knowledge that makes it so easy to create a spanned disc archive.

One other thing I must say is that for large backups (> 25GB) I would highly recommend using external hard disks. Slap 2 500 GB drives into 2 external enclosures and rotate doing a full backup to them at least weekly and you should be fine for home backups. If a backup drive goes bad just replace it, if your main drives go bad replace them and restore from your latest backup. Using this system I highly doubt the average home user would ever have major data loss barring fire/flood/etc that takes out the persons home.

AccuBurn-R http://www.infinadyne.com/accuburn-r.html automatically splits up files in a disc layout so you do not manually have to do it yourself and makes it easy to create a multi disc archive. It can be setup to do automatic backups as well. It does not use any proprietary technology to make the spanned disc archive so any of the discs can be easily read and used on almost any computer without the other discs from the archive or any special software. More information on how the disc archives work can be found here http://www.infinadyne.com/accuburn-rtech.html It is not free but it is not too expensive either at $41.99. I do work for Infinadyne but I thought I would mention the product since it is the only burning software to my knowledge that makes it so easy to create a spanned disc archive.

One other thing I must say is that for large backups (> 25GB) I would highly recommend using external hard disks. Slap 2 500 GB drives into 2 external enclosures and rotate doing a full backup to them at least weekly and you should be fine for home backups. If a backup drive goes bad just replace it, if your main drives go bad replace them and restore from your latest backup. Using this system I highly doubt the average home user would ever have major data loss barring fire/flood/etc that takes out the persons home.

First off, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children already has this "databae" or "library" of child porn images. They would be the maintainers of it, not the ISPs themselves. That is what the article says, and that would be the legal requirements - police and other government agencies cannot keep child porn even for sample purposes.

NCMEC will be undoubtably supplying a hash database to ISPs. MD5 or SHA1 probably as these are in common use today. This would enable matching of identical files quickly and easily.

Unfortunately, we are already running into the limits of simple MD5 matching with child porn cases today. You resize the picture or brighten it up a little bit and that changes the MD5 value and your database, library or whatever is then useless. You have a new, original picture with a new original hash value. There are other ways to accomplish this which do not suffer from these limitations without giving up high-speed autonomous comparisons. Check out http://www.infinadyne.com/icatch.html for some ideas.

Yes, I work at the company that is producing this product.

No it wouldn't. Change a single pixel to a bit brighter or darker color, and the hash no longer matches - in fact, it won't be anywhere near the hash of the original image. No, you either keep the original images and do fuzzy matching, or this database won't be able to match anything.

While you are correct that editing the picture will make the hashes not match you are incorrect in assuming you must keep the original images to do fuzzy matching. The company I work for has a product that can do fuzzy matching without keeping the original picture and the product is immune to minor color changes and cropping. It also will match pictures that have been rotated/flipped.

We have also already set up the ability to use shared databases and the software does all of the tracking information automatically such as who added what images to the database and what their contact information is. I also want to say that the data that is shared about the image does not have the ability to recreate the original image. I think we need to get a hold of these people.

Click the following link to read more: http://www.infinadyne.com/iCatch.html

I wasn't all that impressed with DVDxRescue and neither were my friends. DVDShrink is a better product but I've never been able to figure out why the MPAA didn't go after them.
What about DVDxRescue, which was supposed to have accompanied the later shipments of DVDxCopy - it was supposed to have helped you retrieve data from scuffed|buffed CDs and DVDs? I picked up a copy of software from Arrowkey (now owned by Infinadyne) for a friend of mine because I got tired of watching him use the electrified buffers to grind down the top layers of a CD so you could read the disc.

Right now, what is the recommended software method for retrieval of scratched discs?