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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?"
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?
Um, no. This was an aberration; nothing more, even if its use for those reasons was deliberate on his part.
But here's an actual question:
I can absolutely understand and appreciate that people value some of the features and functionality of things like the Commodore 64 and Newton, and many other machines that were considered to be state-of-the-art in their time.
But why would someone go out of their way to continue to use it? I can understand practical and pragmatic answers like "It's still functional for me" or "I just like it better and I haven't had any problems". But are there other reasons?
I mean, you can literally get systems for free (or next to nothing) that are capable of running various modern operating systems, including various versions of Windows, Mac OS and Mac OS X, myriad Linux distributions to your heart's content, BSD distributions, and so on, that would be much more functional and capable, particularly in the context of the internet and associated applications.
So what's the draw? Why keep running on something like a Commodore 64? Even considering legitimate reasons for continuing to use it, I don't see how sticking with something exceedingly obsolete can be functional when viewed alongside semi-modern systems. I understand people collect all manner of antiques for a variety of reasons, including other things that may be nearly impossible to service or repair easily; is the reason for using obsolete computing equipment the same?
Status? Hobby? Entertainment? Eccentricity? Just to "do it"?
And to reiterate, I can understand collecting pristine Commodore 64s or similar in working order, and even making TCP/IP stacks and such work, just for the sake of doing it. But using it as a primary system exclusively? Some people may own and spend a great deal of time on something like, say, a Model T, but they don't use it as their daily driver...
On another note, I do agree that his system being a Commodore 64 will "complicate investigators' efforts"; but to say that it would be difficult to transfer files "without loss" is disingenuous at best. Do they mean "transfer files" to include possibly-deleted files (in which case I agree there may be "loss")? Do they mean contextual loss, because modern applications may or may not be able to open files and represent context-sensitive features like position, text styles, and so on? Or are they talking about "loss" in that they won't be able to run their standard forensic tools that package everything up with a nice little bow? If they're talking about files representing images and text, I don't care what it is: if it's functional and intact, there's no reason for there to be "loss". I don't care if it takes resorting to eBay, digging up old company engineers, or weirdos on web forums...they should be able to recover anything they need to.
I would say this does raise another valid point, though: as systems and media age, it's actually quite an interesting question how all of this data that isn't transferred to modern day systems will be dealt with, both from a technological and machine- and media-aging point-of-view. And in the context of criminal investigations, what happens if evidence is "lost" (or simply unrecovered) from a 25-year-old computer in a murder investigation which has no statute of limitations? It's an equally difficult question for governments, corporations, and academic institutions that actually *want* to keep the data but are having trouble instituting standards, policies, and mechanisms for data retention.
It's now security by obsolescence!
Really, if the raid happened 20 years ago, everyone would be able to get the info off those floppy disks. Now they've got to find a C64 user group or specialty store (how many of them are there, even on the net?) to transfer the data and convert it to a usable format.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I good friend of mine (who currently lives next to me) wrote the first version of c64net which can be used to communicate directly between a c64 and a pc. One of the tests he performed showed that you can transfer data from a PC to the c64 at about 32KBps.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
You modded this as "Funny", but there are more truths in this text than in any of the other posts. Seriously, any C64 hacker (and there are atleast hundreds of them spread around europe that use the Commodore 64 on a ~daily basis) would know how to transfer all the bits from a C64 floppy to any other format. He would also know what tools this guy used, and how to disassemble them to see how the data is stored (if not common knowledge already). For example, there is the the XzentriX Treffen 2006, http://www.xzentrix.de/ this friday in germany. Just go there, announce a new fast-compo (hack this guys files), and be done with it.
c++;