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Commodore 64 Confuses Austrian Police
toomanyairmiles writes, "It seems that Wolfgang Priklopil, the communications technician who kidnapped Austrian pre-teen Natascha Kampusch, relied on a Commodore 64 as his primary machine. Interestingly this is presenting some problems to the Austrian computer forensics people. Major General Gerhard Lang of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau told reporters it would 'complicate investigators' efforts' and would be difficult to transfer the files to modern computers 'without loss.' Could this be the latest in the criminal world's security strategy? Can we expect to see Spectrums, Archimedes, and Atari STs turning up in police investigations soon?"
From the article:
There are emulators available which can make a modern PC capable of running Commodore 64 programmes but Maj Gen Lang said it would be difficult to transmit the data from Priklopil's machine to a modern computer "without loss".
What, have they forgotten how to create a DIN-5 to Sub-D9 cable? I'm sure google has several websites with the schematic of the machine (also available in the original user's manual), it shouldn't be THAT hard to construct an asynchronous serial cable.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Seriously, I have a Commodore 64 sitting right next to me hooked up to a dos box as a hard drive. Data is data. You just need a x1541 cable. There are lots of free software tools to facilitate this, and the d64 and t64 formats are well supported. You can even use audio tapes and a soundcard to transfer files. Once you have the data on the PC, there are multitudes of C64 emulators to run the software directly. I've been doing this since the late '90s. Google is your friend.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
Two words- Null Modem and Hyperterminal will transfer all the files stored on 5.25" floppies for that Commodore 64 (or even stored on cassette tape) to their Windows machines just fine. It's just ASCII after all, no big problem.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Because in most forensic investigations, they remove the hard-drive from the PC and then perform the investigation using another operating system guaranteed to not have any nasty surprises built in. They're not going to run the risk that buddy has a small script that deletes his entire hard drive if he doesn't hit ctrl-a-s-d-f-enter within seconds of booting up.
There's likely more to it than that as well, but the point is they generally don't want to use the system they've confiscated...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
The back of the Commodore 64 has an RS-232 interface. Any schmuck with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering can hook the Commodore 64's serial interface into the serial interface of any modern desktop.
Here's the best way to do it:
i l.prg) to make your .d64 files. Additionally, if they're feeling up to the challenge, mnib (http://markus.brenner.de/mnib/index.html).
1. Use Star Commander or the equivalent program (ftp://ftp.zimmers.net/pub/cbm/archiving/c64/emut
2. Use PDS Hash Toolkit or some other approved toolkit to hash the disk images you've created.
They can also use 64hdd (www.64hdd.com), set it as drive #10, make directories on the partition they copy the files to, and then individually hash each file using PDS Hash Toolkit. You'll have to hash the 64hdd binaries as well.
If he's a really hardcore user of the C= series, I think the price of that SuperCPU on eBay just went up by a few hundred euro.
Zaxxon
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden
There are a myriad of other issues with this too. For one, the Commodore 64 uses PETSCII and not standard ASCII. To complicate matters more, he may have even used GEOS to store his data on floppy disks, and without the right conversaion tools, coverting that to plain text, muchless PC readable media, is going to be tricky without the right C64 hardware. If he had all that CMD hardware, or stored all his information on a hard disk or CMD formatted floppy disk, it will be harder again.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This is simple. Get a Catweasel floppy controller, and use the bundled tools to make images of the disks. You don't even need any of the original Commodore hardware for this, any PC 5.25" drive will do.
If they're too cheap to do that, an X1541 cable and a copy of Star Commander will work fine, plugged between the Commodore drive and a PC. This shouldn't be forensically valid, because the 1541 is a smart peripheral and could concievably be running a modified ROM.
You mount it in ext2 mode. ext3 is just ext2+journalling, and you can mount a ext3 partition as ext2. This doesn't replay the journal, so you won't get to see any data actually in the journal, but the rest of the data you can see. And there are other ways that you can ensure that Linux will not write to the disk -- for example, `hdparm -r
However, the police don't generally do this, as it's not quite proof against writing *enough*. Instead, they generally connect the drive to a device that is certified to make writing to the drive IMPOSSIBLE (by cutting that wire, or filtering out those commands) and use the drive that way, either to poke around it or to dd the drive to another drive where you can do your work.
Of course, in this case, the guy is dead, so the standard rules of evidence probably don't need to be applied as carefully. It's not like this data will be used to convict him or something ...
in dutch cities, riding a bike is often faster than going by car. it's also cheaper and if you get drunk you can walk home with your bike.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Well, I can sum up the whole article like this:
:) -- It's easy for technical people to understand the realities and limitations of the technology. It's easy to understand that when you copy the contents of the files from one OS to another the contents do not usually change. But for an average person on the jury, if one computer is old and the other computer is new, and they don't speak the same language, well that means that someone had to translate it, right? And if someone translated it, could they have made a mistake? Of course they could! Of course they DID! Again, the hard evidence - the files, the pictures, the notes, etc.. - do not come under scrutiny. It's the techniques, the procedure, the competence of the investigators that get's questioned, and thanks to our "well educated" and "intelligent" jury, sometimes the guilty go free.
Forensic investigators = not stupid
Article author/editor = selling a story / lack of facts
Court system = flaky justice
Being a computer forensic investigator, what I can tell you is that the problem is not with extracting individual files (being current, deleted, overwritten), or even hashing the contents or drive images themselves. Although this does present a certain technical challenge, this can be overcome. Any forensic investigator will tell you that, what he/she finds during his/hers investigation rarely comes under question or scrutiny. You just can not deny the fact that this "stuff" was found on the suspects media. What almost always comes under scrutiny is the technique used in obtaining the evidence. Where the police do have the tools and techniques that have been court tested for the relatively modern machines and OSes, there is no such tool or a battle tested procedure for capturing and processing data from the Commodore 64. That's what the challenge is all about. It's all about how do you get your evidence, and prevent the defence from shooting it down on a technicality that your approach was not forensically sound, because you have not used the court "approved" forensic tools and techniques. -- a side note: there are no court approved forensic tools, at least not in the USA. There are forensic tools that have gone through court scrutiny and been found to be acceptable, but only in conjunction with a proper forensic sound procedure. The tool is only a tool, like a hammer, it can be used to drive a nail into a wall, or crack someone's skull. Define a proper and sound use