Data Recovered From DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Lucas123 writes "The Santa Cruz, Calif. DA's office had been counting on a DVD with the recorded testimony of a victim in case against a serial rapist, but when they popped the video into the player, nothing came up — the disc was blank. To make matters worse, the cop who performed the original interview with the victim told the DA she never said she was 'forced,' so the judge wasn't going to allow the witness to testify in a case where her original statement to police was in conflict with her current testimony. After two local data recovery firms said there was no way to restore the data, a third was able to recover the police interview from two years earlier, which led the defendant to plead guilty earlier this month. Close call."

Comments

eep

[dissy]

Hardware: Recovered Data From a Corrupt DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence...

Re:eep

[lysergic.acid]

i was thinking in the same direction too. but when i read this part of the summary:

but when they popped the video into the player, nothing came up -- the disc was blank.

my immediate question was, "did they try a PAL player?"

what's interesting to me is that two "data recovery firms" told them that the data was unrecoverable, but Seagate Recovery Service was able to recover the data without a problem. that makes me wonder if the earlier data recovery firms even tried to diagnose the problem or if they even knew anything about digital media & data storage. perhaps they thought that just by buying some digital forensics or data recovery software that automatically qualifies them to run a data recovery service. though i'm guessing that's what most police departments do as well.

i guess that's the problem with buying off the shelf software to do your job rather than learning how things work for yourself.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

my immediate question was, "did they try a PAL player?"

I seriously doubt that a police department in Santa Cruz would have recorded it on a PAL device or have a PAL DVD player available.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware: Recovered Data From a Corrupt DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence...

Thats exactly what I thought from the Topic.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware: Recovered Data From a Corrupt DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence...

that's exactly what my mind did!

Re:eep

[frieko]

A PAL disc and a NTSC disc are identical, except for minor differences such as frame rate and resolution. A computer can play either format.

It sounds like the TOC was corrupted, in which case you could still get the data pretty easy by doing something along the lines of cat /dev/dvd | mplayer -

Re:eep

[lysergic.acid]

i know. i read the article.

the PAL remark was a joke.

Re:eep

[Xanj]

Hardware: Recovered Data From a Corrupt DVD Leads To Conviction, 24-Year Sentence

Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence...

maybe cuz 99.9% of computer evidence is total bull

Re:eep

[gregbot9000]

Or they could stick to the analog media that is near failure proof. They probably knew how it worked, it just probably didn't. Write error that wasn't detected, minor corruption in the disk, things that can't be planned for. After having lost 2 years worth of photos to two minor technical issues I'm starting to doubt this whole digital thing. A box of analog photos, while harder to share, is a lot less likely to fail then a hard drive.

Re:eep

[ivucica]

Maybe because it's Slashdot :D

Re:eep

[91degrees]

Yes. Perhaps the data recovery firms simply didn't do DVDs.

Re:eep

[ivucica]

It would be perfect to use digital storage for preserving quality, and if that fails, well, fall back to analog storage :)

Re:eep

[theaveng]

"It was a joke" is not clear from the original post. Too bad smileys are now trademarked, else you could have used one to indicate it was just humor.

Re:eep

[theaveng]

I concur. Why not just use analog videotape? I have tapes that are 30 years old and although there's some deterioration you can still see/hear the original movie.

Self-erasing DVDs and CDs are just too unreliable for important storage of irreplaceable things (convict testimonies, family memories, wedding video). This is why I still use Super VHS-C for my captures - it's robust and captures an image better than DVD (no compression).

Re:eep

[theaveng]

Super VHS looks just as "quality" as any DVD.... I will even go so far as to say "better quality" since S-VHS doesn't have annoying compression blur, blocking, or mosquitos.

I bought one of those fancy "digital" HDD cameras and almost immediately returned it, since the quality was actually worse than my old S-VHS camera.

Re:eep

[HateBreeder]

You can always print your photos out.

Besides, everyone knows that optical media is not suitable as an archival medium. (CD rot.. decay.. we've been hearing about those for years)

In my opinion, The most cost effective/reliable solution for a home user, is buying HDD and using them in some raid configuration, replacing them as they fail once every few years.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

ever heard of the missing section of the watergate tapes?

Re:eep

[ivucica]

I'm not talking about having the same quality within a year. I'm talking about having the same quality in 20 years. If I continuously copy the content from DVD to DVD I will not lose the quality. And no analog material can guarantee 1:1 copy like digital storage.

Re:eep

[Haeleth]

Or they could stick to the analog media that is near failure proof.

If you seriously believe that, then all I can say is that you've been remarkably lucky. I've seen VHS tapes, only about 10 years old, where the soundtrack was so distorted that it was nearly impossible to make out.

Re:eep

[theaveng]

Cops and other institutions are not going to copy their stored DVDs every year. They want something that they can "record once, throw in a box, and forget it". The analog tape fits that role perfectly because even though it might have some magnetic loss, it will still be watchable when Cold Case digs it out of the box in year 2030. ;-)

Re:eep

[ivucica]

You got point here, agreed. I was talking from my POV, and I forgot we're talking about state institutions. And in that case, true, quality is not a priority, long term storage is.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Re:eep

[jimicus]

There's no such thing as media that is near failure proof. That's one of the great benefits of digital media - you can make identical backups before it fails.

Now, why the Santa Cruz DA's office doesn't have some sort of process to keep backups of data and migrate it onto newer media as technology progresses while still retaining proof that it's identical to what was originally recorded (so as to make sure it will stand in a court of law) is another issue altogether - and probably one worth considering seeing as data recovery firms charge an arm and a leg.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

buhsrsly, I have a 6-year old PAL/NTSC DVD player, and have a PAL tv. It sucks when you put in a NTSC DVD and you get a black and white screen with a refresh rate of something like 20.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

That is why I moved to a software raid 5 configuration for the majority of my media. When I do a backup to a DVD I make sure I .rar the files into smaller files and include parity. Always remember to verify the disk afterwords as well.

While this may not be 100% fail safe. I haven't lost anything yet. Even when trying to recover from a dvd-r that was made two years ago

Re:eep

[steveg]

As I recall, those erasures were (probably) deliberate. Debatably, they might have been accidental, but they were almost certainly not caused by tape deterioration.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could stick to the analog media that is near failure proof. They probably knew how it worked, it just probably didn't. Write error that wasn't detected, minor corruption in the disk, things that can't be planned for. After having lost 2 years worth of photos to two minor technical issues I'm starting to doubt this whole digital thing. A box of analog photos, while harder to share, is a lot less likely to fail then a hard drive.

Yeah, digital media is 1000s of times more likely to fail, BUT, it's 1000s of times easier and less expensive to -- back up.

No matter how many times I remind people to backup (company and private data alike), they seem to find it important only after they've lost something of value.

Re:eep

[gordguide]

" ... Or they could stick to the analog media that is near failure proof. ..."
Dude, a DVD is analog media. We use it to store digital data.

" ... A box of analog photos, while harder to share, is a lot less likely to fail then a hard drive. ..."
Dude, we call those "prints". They are analog data stored on analog media.

As someone with some experience with the specific good old analog media of which you speak, I can assure you that they are far from failure proof.

In fact, without special care at every stage it fails quite predictably. The very chemicals that will eat your image are stored in the paper it's printed on.

In the end, the whole story comes down to: why don't we just use "best practices" and quit paying attention to failures based on easily correctable yet sloppy archival technique, whether it's analog or digital data we seek to preserve?

Re:eep

[iamhassi]

"Super VHS looks just as "quality" as any DVD.... I will even go so far as to say "better quality" since S-VHS doesn't have annoying compression blur, blocking, or mosquitos."

I did some research hoping to disprove you, but apparently you're right. S-VHS is up there with LaserDisc and Hi-8, with a 560x480 (420 lines) resolution. DVD provides a 720x480 (520 lines) resolution, not significantly better IMHO, far less than the difference between DVD and 720p HD 1280x720 (720 lines) and 20% of people can't tell the difference between HD and SD anyway. S-VHS camcorders are very cheap used, under $100 on ebay, and the S-VHS players are equally as cheap.

I see no reason why police or other government agencies should use DVD as a storage media for recording video when less corruptible media providing similar quality is available for far less. Maybe they could upgrade to HD video stored on hard drives when prices drop some more in the future, but then you have issues with needing multiple backups to prevent data loss and potential for hackers to steal evidence and easier video tampering.

Sometimes newer isn't better. For just $1,000 they could buy a half dozen S-VHS camcorders and S-VHS players and never worry about corrupt DVDs again.

Re:eep

[mikael]

The failure to retrieve the data off the DVD could have been casused by any number of reasons. Did they use the actual DVD format with all the index file and directiories set up, a zip file or just the video file. Even with just a plain ordinary file, there could have been a mismatch between the encode/decode codecs. Alternatively, it could have been something as simple as smudges on the DVD itself.

I have a good number of DVD's that came free with Sunday newspapers that are impossible to play on a regular DVD player let alone a PC. Sometimes the DVD will play with one player such as 'xine', 'vlc' or 'totem' but not with the other two. Or if it does play, it will give out all sorts of floating-point overflow errors, or generate the occasional sprinkle of green blocks.

Re:eep

[Lachlan Hunt]

my immediate question was, "did they try a PAL player?"

Don't DVD players in the US support both PAL and NTSC? We use PAL in Australia, but I'm fairly sure all TVs and DVD players still support NTSC.

Re:eep

[lysergic.acid]

it's interesting that you brought that up. from my personal experience, most brand name NTSC players sold in the U.S. don't support PAL, but most PAL players sold in, say Taiwan, do support NTSC.

also, cheapo $20 DVD players are more likely to support both NTSC and PAL, as well as DivX/MPEG-4 video, etc. than the expensive $100~200 players. they're usually off-brand players, but you can also find these cheap players by major companies like Panasonic or Sony, though you'll have to enter a code to unlock the player.

Re:eep

[piltdownman84]

This is very true. My PS3 doesn't play my PAL movies, and neither does the integrated DVD player in my Panasonic Surround Sound, but my $50 El cheapo DVD recorder does, as does the crap $30 DVD player in the bedroom.

Re:eep

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you are a typical reactionary Slashbot.

Re:eep

[GuloGulo]

"Why did my mind instantly jump to the conclusion that some data recovery tech worker did someone a favor, got sued by the MPAA, and got a 24-year sentence..."

Because you're cynical and not terribly bright.

Re:eep

[sg_oneill]

Nonsense. Nothing is failure proof. I used to work as a video technician at the DOJ and we had a case where an interview with a 12 year old rape victim, who later suicided, was lost or at least partly lost because the stupid cop didnt plug the audio into the VHS.

Fortunately another cop recorded the interview on a walkman, and the video was pieced together from that that. Which was an utter horror because walkmans dont exactly have precise timing.

But this was a SVHS analog tape and yes, it was errorprone as hell.

Also god damn Slashdot has gotten fiddly to use since it went all Ajaxy. Put the goddamn login back in the form! Retyping comments suck. fucking hell.

Re:eep

[m50d]

Super VHS looks just as "quality" as any DVD.... I will even go so far as to say "better quality" since S-VHS doesn't have annoying compression blur, blocking, or mosquitos.

Lies, frankly. Watch them close up if you can't see the difference from far away, or compare still images.

Re:eep

[theaveng]

Well I briefly owned a Hard Drive based camera which recorded in DVD resolution (720x480 x8 megabit/s). I kept it for about a week and then returned it, because the images truly were worse than my Super VHS camera. The flaw was the compression which made everything blurred. Blocking and "mosquitos" were also a major flaw.

Furthermore a few months ago I purchased one of those DTV-to-analog converter boxes. Super VHS in SP mode produces an image that is indistinguishable from the live DTV image. In the slower EP mode there's a slight blurring.

Anyway I stand by my previous comment: "Super VHS looks just as quality" as any DVD Camcorder's output.

Re:eep

[RockDoctor]

Too bad smileys are now trademarked, else you could have used one to indicate it was just humor.

Only some smileys have been trademarked so far, leaving you with a range of permissible emotions to choose from. You could, for example, have indicated that the post was =:+}====_-_- ("shocking and powerful enough to have stunned me for long enough to grow a knee-length beard while giving me a hairstyle the wife would disapprove of"). This emotion is available for use until midnight tonight when my patent application for it lands on the desk of Vanuatu's Patent Office.

(This message contains humour referenceing the silly concept of patenting emotions and methods for depicting the expression of emotions in messages. The latter is called "writing", there are books full of prior art concerning the technique going back as long as ... well, books.)

Re:eep

[m50d]

Anyway I stand by my previous comment: "Super VHS looks just as quality" as any DVD Camcorder's output.

That's not what you said. You said "Super VHS looks just as "quality" as any DVD", which is outright false. I can well believe that some particular HD based camcorder produced worse output than some other particular SVHS one, but to claim that this holds for all DVDs is simply wrong.

Re:eep

[HTH NE1]

I see no reason why police or other government agencies should use DVD as a storage media for recording video when less corruptible media providing similar quality is available for far less.

I can name one: S-VHS decks are becoming exceedingly rare and expensive and VHS as a technology will likely cease producing players, recorders, and tapes sometime around February 17, 2009 whereas DVDs will be around for far longer. Try looking somewhere other than eBay to determine the current market in non-used hardware. You can't find them at all in brick-and-mortar stores and the only one sold as new through Amazon.com is from B&H Photo-Video, also plays Mini-DV, and costs $525.00 + $19.55 Estimated Shipping.

I don't think I'd want evidence accessibly to be dependent upon the used hardware market of eBay.

Even the D-VHS decks won't play back S-VHS tapes at better than VHS quality.

Re:eep

[HTH NE1]

Generally Sony Region 1 hardware for North America won't play PAL format disks, even if the disks are Region 0. Some of their hardware have also been known to be picky with recordable DVD media and recordable CD media except for Music CD-R.

I have one of the Sony 400-disc DVD changers that upconverts via HDMI. Attempts to duplicate B-sides of flipper DVDs have uniformly resulted in non-playable disks with this player. A friend with an earlier model noted it wouldn't play music off of CD-Rs unless they were Music CD-Rs; I haven't tested mine for CD-R playing.

Generally any DVD player that has a backdoor code to make it region-free can play both NTSC and PAL disks to the local video standard. Aspect and pitch may be off a bit.

Only Meta-Data was damaged

[imaginaryelf]

"Our analysis showed there to be damage to the lead-in section of the data," Keith Gnagey, vice president of professional services for i365, said in an e-mail statement about the recovery effort. That meant any attempt "with normal playing software would not be able to get past the beginning of the data."

That's like the directory tree being messed up but the data being intact.

I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[aliquis]

Maybe they are more into "recovery" than "troubleshooting."

Which just confirms my fear that they can't recovery shit in serious situation but just the normal stuff. I've been thinking if there was any idea to turn in my sisters laptop HDD (crash after laptop drop onto table) or not, but I guess not in most cases. Also it cost a fortune anyway.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[RiffRafff]

I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

Really. I wonder what the names of those two firms are, so we'll know who NOT to go to.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[sith]

Almost sounds like a DVD that wasn't finalized in a direct-to-dvd camcorder.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Compholio]

Almost sounds like a DVD that wasn't finalized in a direct-to-dvd camcorder.

I don't know about that, but I've run into this problem when there's dust on the disk when it's recorded. The laser etches the dust rather than the media, resulting in a disk that's got a small blank section.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[blue l0g1c]

I bet they still got paid for their efforts, which is probably enough for them.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet they still got paid for their efforts, which is probably enough for them.

I doubt it. The two times my company needed to use a data service to recover data from dead hard disks, it was pay for play. If they didn't get any data back, they didn't get paid.

It cost about $1000 each time.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Belial6]

When my father owned a computer shop, he would regularly get people trying to sell him software that would let him do "data recovery". There was no way my father was qualified to do data recovery. He eventually focused only on printer repair because he found he wasn't really qualified to even do most PC work. That didn't stop the sales guys from trying to convince him that if he bought their software, he would do fine in the "data recovery" field.

So, it doesn't surprise me that two local data recovery firms got stumped. They probably ran the software they bought against the DVD and when nothing came up, they said it was unrecoverable.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[TooMuchToDo]

Years ago I sent a hard drive into OnTrack that had been soaked in coffee by the owner of a company (spilled coffee in a Thinkpad laptop, the Thinkpad kept running like a champ, the drive died shortly thereafter). $1500 and 2 days later, we had DVDs with the content of the drive.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[aliquis]

I suspect the replaced the logic board / moved the plates to another drive?

The problem is that I have no idea if the heads has slapped into the discs or something such, damage on the electronics would seem salvageable, damage on the actual disks less so =P

Also while she would probably want them back $1500 for 2 weeks of New Zeeland photos of which she still have some on a cd and some on paper + various other images for a half years worth or something such may be to much.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[bigjarom]

I'm interested to know how you came to this conclusion. Did you find the laser-etched dust particle on the finished disk?

Maybe you could send the dust to Seagate Recovery Service to get that blank section back.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[TooMuchToDo]

For personal stuff like that, I'd write it off and tell her to make backups in the future. MozyHome is $4.95/month for unlimited backups. A small price to pay.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[DigiShaman]

Maybe we should start recording DVDs at 16x. That amount of centrifugal force should fling any lose debris off. So I would think anyways...

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[besalope]

Geek Squad and Circuit City PC-Technician?

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

Geek Squad uses Ontrack.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Compholio]

I noticed after burning the disk that there was dust on the bottom (a lot of it concentrated in one spot). So, I blew it off and the part where the dust used to be was distinctly the "not burned" color. For shits and giggles I tried the disk anyway and there were a bunch of inaccessible files. Since I noticed it right away I just chucked the disk and made a new one (I was working with data on a PC). This happened quite a while ago, but if you're curious I could attempt to intentionally reproduce it.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[myz24]

Check out jungle disk, it is potentially cheaper

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[noidentity]

I've run into this problem when there's dust on the disk when it's recorded. The laser etches the dust rather than the media, resulting in a disk that's got a small blank section.

You may have had that problem with dusty media, but the explanation sounds suspect. The laser beam is focused to a point inside the disc, not at the surface; at the surface, it's wide and dust simply reduces its intensity at the focused point (diagram). Looks like BD discs have much less tolerance of dust, due to the data layer being so close to the surface.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

that happened to me once, I run sound at my church and record sermons on cd. forgot to finalize one. The next week the secretary was confused why it appeared to be blank on her pc. I slapped it in the cd recording deck, which recognized it as an unfinalized cd. I finalized it and it worked fine then.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[The MAZZTer]

I wonder if there's any people out there who intentionally corrupt an ISO image in a controlled way that is known to be recoverable by someone who knows what they are doing (but not perhaps by automated tools) and then sending out burns of the DVD to different companies to see what they can do.

Might be expensive though.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

he found he wasn't really qualified to even do most PC work

Sorry to sound spiteful, but your father is clearly retarded.
Any moron can do PC repair work.
Posting anonymously because... well just how low should we let the barrier slip?

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[the_womble]

Maybe the headline should read "incompetent data recovery nearly lets rapist get away"

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[tylernt]

I don't know if it was foreign matter or a manufacturing defect in the disc, but I had recorded DVD hanging on my wall at work that had a fuzzy blob of "not burned" on it too. So it's not a farfetched idea.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Compholio]

You may have had that problem with dusty media, but the explanation sounds suspect. The laser beam is focused to a point inside the disc, not at the surface; at the surface, it's wide and dust simply reduces its intensity at the focused point (diagram [geekspeak.org]). Looks like BD discs have much less tolerance of dust, due to the data layer being so close to the surface.

I'll grant that "etches" is an inappropriate description, "blocks the beam, slightly toasts the dust, and prevents data from being written to the disk" would be more accurate but is also much more verbose. "Wide" is relative, the dust on the disk was much larger than the beam waist. I'm not saying this happened with a tiny speck of dust - more like a big fat sharpie-stroke of dust.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[danamania]

And it's not a problem when that happens. The blank section is error-corrected around, and the disc works fine.

Here's one I did, with a huge oily fingerprint purposely put on a DVD before recording, it was burned, and the 'shadow' of the fingerprint shows up as a huge unburnt patch after the original print has been wiped off.

The disc worked fine afterwards, and worked fine for quite a while until I lost it.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Compholio]

I was transferring large data sets to the disk, not making a video DVD. I would expect the MPEG-2 error-correction to take care of a minor blemish, raw data files not so much. I bet if you made a mark with a sharpie about half the length of that fingerprint, cleaned it off after recording the disk, and then tried to play it then your player would get completely stuck when it got to that point on the disk.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[mysidia]

I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

Your average el-cheapo "data recovery" firm is stumped by anything their point-and-click canned software can't deal with.

optical media may not have been their specialty.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[afidel]

I know with Drivesavers you pay an analysis fee upfront, if they can't recover anything they refund it, if they can they will apply it to your recovery bill, if you choose not to pay for recovery they keep the fee to pay for the techs time. This is completely fair in my eyes as just getting to that stage may have involved swapping controllers or moving platters to a new enclosure.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[danamania]

Same - recording data-only to the disk, and the error correction worked OK there.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Hal_Porter]

Actually that makes me think of a hair brained scheme. The finger print is essentially a mask applied to the data. Your eyes can see it but the DVD drive error corrects it away because there are enough gaps in the mask where the original data 'shows through' for the error correction to correct away the errors.

Now it seems like if you could record raw data you could make a DVD with a pattern visible to the naked eye but invisible to the DVD reader. So rather than waiting ages and buying expensive media for things like Lightscribe or Labelflash you could burn both the data and the label at the same time and on any media. Unlike DiscT@2 which burned logos on the data side of the disk, the space can be used for both logo and data at the same time.

You could do it with arbitrary bitmaps too - take the bitmap and make holes in it through which enough data shows through to make the disk readable. The burning software could do this with a mask cunningly constructed to make enough holes even in a solid bitmap to make the disk readable. Hell you could let the user select the tradeoff between image quality and error margin.

There's a a downside of course, the more solid the image the more the error correction will be stressed even for a disc which can be read perfectly. It seems like a disc burned with this technology would be less resistant to scratches and fingerprints.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[rts008]

That sounds like a reasonable approach to a data recovery business that will allow for a solid reputation and huge trust factor to build up a good business to grand levels of market share. Kudos to them!

Your comment makes me wonder two things:
who were the two outfits that claimed it impossible,
and how SRS found the lead-in corruption so fast....Hmmmm...

As a comment above asks, who are these two outfits that claimed impossible-I don't ever want to use them!

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[jamesh]

I can't believe the other "two local data recovery firms" got stumped by this simple problem.

I have more trouble believing that the police only had a single copy of the interview, and no transcript (or maybe that was on the DVD too?).

If the TV shows i've watched are correct, then they are supposed to give a copy to the interviewee too, so what's wrong with running off another copy (or 3) for storage at another site???

I firmly believe that if your are relying on a data recovery firm to save you then someone, somewhere, hasn't done their job properly.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[mcrbids]

Way back when, I bought several such softwares. Most was overblown - lets you "undelete", etc. But then I found some software that perhaps wasn't technically "data recovery" software, but might as well have been...

SPINRITE II. That software was AWESOME!

Back when MFM/RLL was still a consideration, media failures were all too common. Drive sectors would go bad, your FAT table would be corrupted, and your system was horked, often so badly that you couldn't even boot.

But with a copy of SpinRite II and a DOS boot floppy, and a *LOT* of time (often 2-3 days!) and in nearly every case, the computer would be brought back to full operation. I had one system where, whenever the owner had problems with bad sectors, he would rename the file and re-copy from backups. This would cause the area with the bad blocks to become unused, sort of a "manual re-mapping".

Well, his backups got horked right about the same time that the FAT itself corrupted. The system was gone, the data was gone, and he was in a severe panic. But Spinrite II took over a week to recover everything. But it did. Everything. Even the renamed files read/wrote flawlessly.

Could I have recovered this DVD? Probably not - I never claimed to be a "data recovery expert". I was honest with my clients about what I was qualified to do (diagnose/reformat/reload) and what I wasn't. But I recovered LOTS of data anyway.

Now for the funny part:

I owned a small computer sales/service shop for several years. You know, the friendly neighborhood type. We did *alot* of computer repairs. We gave out free diagnostics, which was an excellent way to get more repairs - the diagnosis was free, the repair was reasonable, customers almost always bought.

Frequently, we'd be asked to fix software woes, etc. We'd warn about the risks of software problems, possible loss of data, offer to backup their data first, and we'd even make them sign release forms that they did NOT want us to back up the data.

And then we'd back up the data anyway, routinely. We used a backpack drive that was big enough to keep a dozen or so drive images on it. (parallel port drive with a driver loaded by floppy or CD - this is before USB was common)

Granted, most of the time, the backup wasn't needed. But when it was, (and it was, maybe 1/4 of the time) we would then charge $150 "data recovery". (to reload the data from our backup) Since our charge for backups was $50, our customers made out slightly in the odds, but we were still the heroes and those who actually needed the data were not too hesitant to pay, especially since, with this method, our success rate was 100%!

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[digitalchinky]

Your comment is not insightful at all, you are just looking for someone else to drag along for the blame, for any stupid reason other than the right one. The individuals doing the investigation would have been the ones who let the rapist get away with the crime. End of story. "Here at the California DA office we routinely put all our eggs in one basket". What kind of shop are they running there anyway? - a single video recording device, one disc, a large number of months between the interview recording and the need to use that disc in court. Nobody bothers to see if the disc actually works until it's needed.

Now that is incompetence at its finest.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[theaveng]

Or just clone your data across two drives (your c: drive and an external USB drive). If one fails you still have the second for backup.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Xolotl]

I did something similar: put a DVD in to burn, not noticing it had a fingerprint on the underside (it was from a cakebox and had evidently been handled carelessly earlier)

Anyway, after burning the pattern of the fingerprint could be seen in the changed-color DVD medium, just like your dust. I thought it was rather cool. :)

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[sam0737]

Wow. Must be a very "big" dust if you mean it costs data corruption. Normally the forward error correction should make the playback just fine.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[jimicus]

Not to defend these people but data storage systems are seldom sold with the caveat "look out, these things don't last forever, make sure you've got a plan B". You'd be amazed how many people outside of IT simply don't consider backup to be important.

And even if a salesman did make that clear to the DA's office, I wonder how long it would be before a less than honest salesman made out that his product didn't have that issue (even though it's exactly the same technology) and took the contract?

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to defend these people but data storage systems are seldom sold with the caveat "look out, these things don't last forever, make sure you've got a plan B".

I work in IT storage management and I can tell you that data storage systems used by major businesses and government agencies, such as netapp, emc, datadomain etc are most definitely sold with caveats, and since they often run in the millions, the people purchasing and installing them are competent enough to know that as well.

The use of a single DVD to store important evidence has nothing to do with data storage systems, but is a flaw of that particular police departments routines for evidence, and they should get spanked for it. Most likely it was a single police offier who is to blame for the error.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[ion.simon.c]

What sort of "PC Repair" are we talking about?

If it's the "replace boards one-by-one, then throw away the bad one" style of "repair", then anyone can do that.
*Really* repairing something by replacing *components* on a board takes quite a bit of training and knowledge.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

no, no, no... put the blame squarely where it should be: The police department Human Resources department... they hired the screwups. Hold on a sec... let's blame the PREVIOUS HR department who hired the CURRENT HR department...they should have known. In fact, lets go all the way back to when the city was a tiny town and blame the mayor back in the 1800s who started this whole beauracratic bungle

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[MikeBabcock]

Once data recovery was necessary, the incompetence was already obvious -- on the part of those making or storing the recording.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[home-electro.com]

incompetent cops, really. Making such an important recording and not having it recorded on an alternative media warrants a gross negligence charge.

For christ sake, record it on DVD if you want, but get a 50$ voice recorder, just in case.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[home-electro.com]

if you see spots of 'non-burned' color it's not dust. It's called dirt. I wonder why you chose to place a disc with dirt into recorder.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Hognoxious]

Now it seems like if you could record raw data you could make a DVD with a pattern visible to the naked eye but invisible to the DVD reader.

I thought I'd heard of something like that already.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[jmichaelg]

>Now that is incompetence at its finest.

I'm not sure what the DA's office could have done to protect itself. Sure, they could have made copies. But if the DVD substrate is shitty, you'll have multiple degraded copies instead of one degraded original. Perhaps you spread your risk by putting the backup copy on a hard drive somewhere. Hard drives are subject to jarring, power surges, etc so that's no guarantee either.

When data really, really matters, how do you ensure it'll be there when you need it? What's the optimal backup strategy?

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Toll_Free]

I lived in Santa Cruz. I dealt with the legal system in Santa Cruz. It is a sham, and a travesty, at best.

Bob Lee (the D.A.) has absolutely no brains. What-so-ever. His office REGULARLY loses and destroys evidence (in my case, I was dead to rights wrong, but on trial date, the DA had to come forth and admit, foolishly, that her entire case was based upon evidence she couldn't find. All fine and dandy, but then the bitch wanted to retry me after she admitted she had no evidence and the jury was hung).

This surprises me not. I also know that Santa Cruz COUNTY has NO data recovery specialists. Santa Cruz County uses local computer repair shops. Period. They outsource their IT, so when the outsourcing firm couldn't fix it, it went to their friend. He couldn't fix it, so they both declared the DVD unreadable.

Enter real data recovery firm, and a few hours later, they are back in the business of ruining lives.

Santa Cruz County is a crock of shit. Bottom line. They are inept, can't catch people stabbing each other in front of officers on holidays downtown, and LIVE for the homeless. The entire economy is propped up by Mexican illegal labor force and marijuana (who doesn't like to smoke a joint, but when your LARGEST tax revenue for the city is a medicinal marijuana dispensary, and that owner of said dispensary runs FOR CITY COUNCIL, that's telling).

--Toll_Free

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[zippthorne]

That's really not hair-brained at all. Except for the readable data part. People used to write utilities to draw pictures in CDs in the days before lightscribe. (come to think of it, it's probably where they got their idea from)

I even remember reading somewhere that since the pixels would be so very small (a CD actually makes for a crude diffraction grating) that it might even be possible to write crude holograms to them.

I imagine, as long as your gaps were shorter than a cm or so, that you might be able to do that with regular CDs. Or perhaps someone could modify mkisofs to produce an image that doesn't actually have data around the picture area.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Hal_Porter]

Or perhaps someone could modify mkisofs to produce an image that doesn't actually have data around the picture area.

That's what DiscT@2 did - the disk could either have graphics or data in any particular place but not both. My scheme isn't like that - you can have both graphics and data in the same place because the error correction is set up to remove the graphics bits from the raw data when the disk is read.

CDs use CIRS error correction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Interleaved_Reed-Solomon_Coding
Reed-Solomon codes are specifically useful in combating mixtures of random and burst errors. CIRC corrects error bursts up to 3,500 bits in sequence (2.4 mm in length as seen on CD surface) and compensates for error bursts up to 12,000 bits (8.5 mm) that may be caused by minor scratches

I think DVDs use a similar algorithm. With CDs someone worked out you could theoretically drill a 1mm hole in the CD and the error correction could recover the bits *. Essentially the label is using that.

Now writing a label on the disk in a 10pt font for example will leave some errors (the dark bits of the font) longer than 2.4mm. But that's no problem, you can just add some of the data bits back in. In fact the CD/DVD mastering software would take the label bitmap, mask it onto the data bitmap and then check if the error correction algorithm would be able to still read the data. If not it would remove some of the label bits and replace them with data bits and try again. It would keep doing this until the disc was readable. You'd have a bunch of algorithms which would be user selectable, and a preview function for the resulting image with a zoom in a GUI.

An obvious algorithm would be to just remove 50% of the the label bits and replace them with data bits. The image would be dimmed but it would be computationally cheap. You could do much more complex things that would work out which parts of the image needed to be dimmed (presumably large dark areas) and do it selectively.

* This is a bit misleading. In the digital domain this is true. In practice a 1mm hole would mess up the tracking so the CD would skip. Of course in my scheme the bits are removed digitally without affecting the tracking. However it shows you that you can have large dark areas added for a label and have them removed. So barcodes, labels in a small font and so on would be fine.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Belial6]

It was the replace boards one-by-one style of repair. I'm not bragging about his skill. The point is that he DIDN'T have a lot of skills with computers. He was maybe a little better than what you would expect at a Best Buy or Fry's. Printers, he would break out a soldering iron for, but computers, no. That didn't stop the 'Data Recovery' software manufacturer from trying to convince him that all he needed to know was how to boot their software, and he would be a data recovery expert. No doubt, there are plenty of people that have gone for the sales pitch.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[FLEB]

Offsite or WORM-disc would still be smart, though. You could lose an external drive in the same power surge or lightning strike as you lost the original machine.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[fafaforza]

Criticizing companies that claim to be experts at something, but then get stumped by a fairly simple issue, should be lauded, and the names of these companies should be published.

What if this chance "hunch" never took place? What if the "reputation" of the experts was believed, as it often is, since they are experts demanding astronomical fees for their services, and the DVD was believed to be completely defective, and it and the case both tossed? Don't you think something like this should be corrected?

Obviously backup plans are desirable, but that doesn't let off the hook those two companies.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[xlsior]

Frequently, we'd be asked to fix software woes, etc. We'd warn about the risks of software problems, possible loss of data, offer to backup their data first, and we'd even make them sign release forms that they did NOT want us to back up the data And then we'd back up the data anyway, routinely. We used a backpack drive that was big enough to keep a dozen or so drive images on it. (parallel port drive with a driver loaded by floppy or CD - this is before USB was common)

So, let me get this straight: After they explicitely told you not you, you copied their private data anyway and stored it for your own potential financial benefit later on?
And lying about it too by charging them extra for your expertise 'recovery' rather than the standard 'restore a backup' fee.
To make matters worse: by restoring the backup you may have made matters worse for your customer since you just overwrite potentially recoverable files with older versions of themselves, pretty much guaranteeing that they lost work.

This is wrong at so many levels. You may have thought you were protecting people from themselves, but you probably broke at least half a dozen laws in the process...

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved Spinrite in the old days, too. I was surprised it is still going strong, now Spinrite 6.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be amazed how many people inside of IT simply don't consider backup to be important.

Fixed

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[arth1]

I remember one laptop that the IT department said was unrecoverable, and the company they sent it in to said was unsalvagable.

Upon investigation, it turned out that the user in question had wanted to install Linux, and had started in the wrong end by trying to install a boot loader, and failed.

What did it take to restore the laptop?
dd if=saved-mbr of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

After that, the machine worked perfectly again. Not a single byte lost.

The user got all the blame. Sure, he shouldn't have messed around with company property like that, but c'mon -- neither the outsourced IT department nor the data recovery company being even waved a finger at for their high level of incompetence?

(Nor did the sysadmin who did salvage it get as much as a "thank you", but that's usual enough...)

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[ion.simon.c]

Big 10-4. *I* understood what you were saying. Your dad sounds like a wise fellow.

I was hoping that Mr. AC upthread would come back and think about what he said. : /

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[aliquis]

Shouldn't even partitions and all show up in any program even though the master boot block is messed up? Or?

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[piltdownman84]

I got pulled into the police station last year for a whole lot of nothing involving a friend. I was told very clearly that I was being videotaped, with a redundancy audio recording and just to be on the safe side the detective used a personal tape recorder as well. So they would have had copies of everything I said from three different sources, sounds like the california DA could have used such a system.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Protoslo]

And now you go quoting the parent with no sense of irony! Harebrained! Harebrained! The scheme is worthy of a rabbit, not a strand of hair. Now you've made me...loose...my temper!

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Averyge Joe]

You're wrong. They are police officers, not geeks. In order to follow procedures such as what you suggest would take numerous police officers off the streets due to budget conflicts. They had reasonable expectations that the stuff was supposed to work. And it usually does. My biggest problem with their procedure was that there was absolutely no second source. They should have centralized storage as well as dvd's for the files.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[zippthorne]

good to know.

That's what I get for using words I've heard and not read.

Re:Only Meta-Data was damaged

[Anonymous Coward]

Spinrite was the absolute best piece of software in the 90s. Yes, even better than Mosaic or Wintrumpet.

how much did that cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great and all but I kinda wonder how much taxpayer money it took to recover the thing when an old school magnetic tape would've done the job with a lot less fuss.

Re:That third house wasn't ILM was it? (not a joke

[ColdWetDog]

in a day where a few people in their basement can render decent cgi, I'm wondering if this "third firm" was not hired to do a little "extraordinary rendering"

For best results, one should loosen their tin-foil hat occasionally.

Just sayin'.

protecting your data

[sakura the mc]

a couple questions spring to mind.

what is the best way to "erase" your data on optical media?

toss em into a fire and let them melt? lets see them recover that smoldering mess.

then, what to replace your optical media with?

i can only carry so many usb sticks. isnt data recovery from formatted solid state drives extremely time-consuming, if not difficult?

with the advent of cheap and high capacity hard drives, i have not burnt anything to an optical medium in maybe 2 - 3 years? there is simply no need. i would like to continue this pattern, but i want my data to be quickly and easily disposed of if need be.

Re:protecting your data

[Anonymous Coward]

Shredder. They are cheap and make sharp bits of confetti. Noisy though.

Re:protecting your data

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Shred them.
2. Burn them.
3. Mix them with concrete.
4. Blow up the concrete.
5. ???
6. Profit!

I'm pretty sure 5 is "nuke the debris from orbit" but someone more versed than I should probably clarify.

Re:protecting your data

[fishbowl]

We shred DVDs. It's a consumer-level shredder. It cuts the disc all to hell and is even pretty thorough at removing the medium from the substrate, or whatever the nomenclature is.
There are consumer shredders that will do discs, but ours was definitely not cheap. A GBC Shredmaster "DOD" model. (We're not a defense shop, we're a research hospital/medical college, among other things.)

Re:protecting your data

[gnick]

For residential destruction, most people already have a microwave and don't feel like sinking $$ into a CD-capable shredder.

Plus, it looks cool and only takes ~3 seconds.

Re:protecting your data

[Merls the Sneaky]

Microwave 5 seconds.

Re:protecting your data

[Anonymous Coward]

Microwaving them stinks though, and can be messy. Paper shredder is useful for paper, credit cards, and optical disks, so it's not a bad investment for getting rid of stuff. Decent ones are kind of pricey though.

Re:protecting your data

[Anonymous Coward]

Spin the disc at a high rate of rotation inside a shielded area.

Re:protecting your data

[Renraku]

Try impossible.

It is, in theory, under the best case situation, possible to recover something erased from a solid state device.

Best case situation being that it wasn't overwritten, the 'registers' all had the same thing written over the data (zeros, for example), it was very recent, and there are no bad sectors.

If any one of those was not involved, data recovery is just guessing, and should never be allowed in a court of law. Neither would a note pieced together from letters on uniformly-cut letter-sized bits of paper..as the message could be rearranged from anything to anything.

Re:protecting your data

[stevied]

Many shredders will take optical media, the very cheap one I have at home won't, though.

I wrap them up in a few sheets of newspaper and "fold" them in half with my foot. Most will shatter, some just bend, but either way, no casual dumpster diver is going to bother with them. Particularly if they go in a trashbag full of rotting food, and nobody has any reason to suspect me of holding particularly interesting data, anyway.

Re:protecting your data

[Kagura]

The government shreds their papers and discs into very small pieces, and then burns them.

Re:protecting your data

[Kagura]

We've recovered the one-time pad he used, your honor, and it proves he is guilty!

ha ha,

[Erris]

It had better be enough for them, because they won't be getting another call.

Simple......

[Anonymous Coward]

Just upload them all to Youtube and it'll never happen again.

Re:Simple......

[howlingmadhowie]

ah, a perfect example of cloud computing. ladies and gentlemen, i give you the future

Tinfoil hat eh?

[plasmacutter]

in a day where a few people in their basement can render decent cgi, I'm wondering if this "third firm" was not hired to do a little "extraordinary rendering"

For best results, one should loosen their tin-foil hat occasionally.

Just sayin'.

Funny how everyone here is fully aware of the capabilities of our current state of technology in the hands of people with enough resources, yet when someone suggests an actual, real-world possibility for misuse, or the possibility of despotism it's "tinfoil hat" time.

I'm not saying they're doing it to me, or that they're in the walls, but seriously, have those lessons of the mccarthy and now bush eras gone straight out the other ear? I suppose GITMO doesn't exist? I suppose every single protestor is an "anarchist" just like the news says?

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[fishbowl]

I think you overestimate the resources of the Santa Cruz police.
McCarthy? Bush? GITMO?? Seriously, Santa Cruz isn't exactly playing in that world.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[plasmacutter]

I think you overestimate the resources of the Santa Cruz police.
McCarthy? Bush? GITMO?? Seriously, Santa Cruz isn't exactly playing in that world.

yes, because if such a job were to be done, it would be a federal prosecution and not delgated to a smaller, less significant branch.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[jackbird]

I think the GP overestimates the state of the art in 3D rendering and animation. I don't think any team anywhere could fake a video like that to the satisfaction of the people who were actually there. Much less do it in secret on a DA's budget.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That does seem unlikely. Of course, the witness recorded on the DVD was the victim, so I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to re-enact testimony to suit purposes of conviction and then announce you'd recovered the data.

Of course, the odds of that having happened are negligible. Much more likely this is on the up and up.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the GP overestimates the state of the art in 3D rendering and animation. I don't think any team anywhere could fake a video like that to the satisfaction of the people who were actually there. Much less do it in secret on a DA's budget.

They don't ave to convince the alleged rapist, just the jury. The suspect already has 2 strikes in the mind of the jury:
1) He's "the defendant"
2) He need s defense lawyer, clearly he's guilty.

You think the cops who get bonus points for the "collar" are going to worry about whether that's the real tape/recording/disk?

Some cops do bad shit. Let's say just 3% like the rest of the population. ~97% of the cops who see the other 3% breaking the law don't say anything.

The 97% that keep their mouths shut are the problem and they are the reason many of "we the people" don't trust cops. And I'm an upper middle class white guy. I'd hate to be a poor black guy near the scene of a crime...

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[gregbot9000]

OH MY GOD! That explains why the cops in the background were the same three guys just repeated! And why the interviewing officer wasn't looking at the suspect but a few feet over. That also explains why they were tolerating that annoying officer with the Jamaican accent!

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Dhalka226]

The man plead out after seeing the video. There was no jury, no trial, and the only ones convinced of anything was the criminal and perhaps his attorney -- convinced enough that they wouldn't be able to beat the charges based on this tape, if nothing else.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Darth]

Officer Binks was present in the courtroom. I assure you, he's real.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[howlingmadhowie]

state of the art 3D rendering? my oh my, we do have a short memory: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/american_beheaded_in_islamic_online_video/

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was a rape trial. You know what the conviction rate is for rape trials? I don't either, but I do know that womens' rights groups are constantly complaining that it's too low. Because it's almost always just his word against hers, and there are plenty of lines the defense can try -- that she didn't say "no" clearly, or that she said "yes" and then regretted it afterwards, or that she was acting provocatively and therefore deserved what she got, or whatever. Rape is one of the few crimes where the defendant really is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

There is no way that a faked DVD would convince a jury in a rape trial to convict. The defense would get forensic experts in who would rip it to pieces and use it to paint the picture of the evil state trying to jail an innocent man. The jury would lap that up.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[grumbel]

If you want to fake video you are doing much better by using 2D composition instead of 3D rendering, the later one is still quite a bit away from being practical, the first one however can produce quite convincing results without all that much effort.

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to use fancy 3D rendering and animation to fake something like that. Find a person who looks very similar to your target, and with some makeup and a badly lighted room it might work. Lesson: A low-tech approach is often superior.

[Posted AC to please the tin-foil-hat fraction ;)]

Re:Tinfoil hat eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The suspect already has 2 strikes in the mind of the jury: 1) He's "the defendant" 2) He need s defense lawyer, clearly he's guilty.

Three strikes; I heard he's a nigger.

So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[bogaboga]

...After two local data recovery firms said there was no way to restore the data, a third was able to recover the police interview from two years earlier, which led the defendant to plead guilty earlier this month. Close call..."

So this stuff happens in the first world? While I am shocked, I am not that surprised at all. We as a nation have been "sinking" fast.

From our auto industry's junk products, to corruption (Haliburton), nepotism and incompetence (Katrina), among our elected officials, it's been downhill for a long time.

So just tell me...how is different would this story be if it happened in the 3rd world?

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[roguetrick]

I'm curious, but are you insane?

Is the answer to your question: They wouldn't use DVDs?

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[bogaboga]

And you think DVDs are a big deal? Think again. On healthcare for example, we are beaten by Cuba!

I guess you are among those who do not believe that some of these so called 3rd world countries are *slightly* ahead of us especially in what a cellphone can be used for. Now, that's a fact.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Faylone]

In the 3rd world, they would have just had an execution, no interrogation.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[scottblascocomposer]

While I am shocked, I am not that surprised at all.

...and I am puzzled as to how that works out!

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[UncleTogie]

I guess you are among those who do not believe that some of these so called 3rd world countries are *slightly* ahead of us especially in what a cellphone can be used for.

Call me crazy... I typically use it for telephone calls. If there's some hidden Goatse use that I'm unaware of, then ignorance is bliss!

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

...After two local data recovery firms said there was no way to restore the data, a third was able to recover the police interview from two years earlier, which led the defendant to plead guilty earlier this month. Close call..."

So this stuff happens in the first world? While I am shocked, I am not that surprised at all. We as a nation have been "sinking" fast.

From our auto industry's junk products, to corruption (Haliburton), nepotism and incompetence (Katrina), among our elected officials, it's been downhill for a long time.

So just tell me...how is different would this story be if it happened in the 3rd world?

How is our auto industry producing junk products? Have you even taken a look at Ford/Mercury since the 90s? The Fusion and Milan have better ratings than Toyota and Honda. Not including equal or better gas mileage.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[aXi]

...After two local data recovery firms said there was no way to restore the data, a third was able to recover the police interview from two years earlier, which led the defendant to plead guilty earlier this month. Close call..."

Please learn proper English. They mean the third company, not the third world.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[gnick]

While I am shocked, I am not that surprised at all.

...and I am puzzled as to how that works out!

It's easy:
1) Turn on a lamp.
2) Remove the light bulb.
3) With your left-hand forefinger, touch the silver-colored outer shielding where the light bulb screws in.
4) With your right-hand forefinger, touch the contact at the bottom of the receptacle.

Sorry, no "???" nor "profit", but you'll be shocked without being surprised. Hope that helps.

=)

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[bogaboga]

Haha, you make me laugh. Ask yourself...Who is doing the rating? With this corruption, I can trust nobody except the average American who has proven that the Japanese build better cars and have been doing this for decades.

In case you did not know, the American car giants have lost market share...have a look http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0501/06/A01-50668.htm.

Those Japanese cars are simply better built, have a good resale value and do not give a lot of headache. Aren't these the folks who endorsed the Malibu as the car of the year until it was tested on the road? It was, you guessed it, almost junk. Some folks will not touch it with a 10 foot pole. In the mean time, the Camry and Accord are doing fine.

Have you driven a Lexus lately? Sit in one...just sit in one and have a look...then compare it with any garbage from Detroit...then you return to educate me.

What else do you need? I doubt these 3 car giants will be around in the next 3 years. And I am not a lone. By the way, I drive a 2007 Lexus GS 450. I cannot ask for a better machine.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's just fishing for a Soviet Russia joke? I'm sure someone will come along shortly and chime in...

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[gregbot9000]

I guess you are among those who do not believe that some of these so called 3rd world countries are *slightly* ahead of us especially in what a cellphone can be used for.

You mean like in bombs as the trigger device? I know they do that a lot in some third world countries.

BTW adding more features to a cellphone could actually be a further sign of poverty. In a developed country people buy a PDA and a cell phone, they don't need to save money by getting a super cell. Though they do that now with the Smart phones, which are as good, and available in the US, as any cell phones in the world.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[BeanThere]

On healthcare for example, we are beaten by Cuba!

References? And define "beaten" (does your definition depend on health being state-provided? then of course, Cuba is a communist country). Beyond the fake tourist front-ends, Cuba's a rotten hole.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the US doees not have worse health care than cuba. They have *one hospital* with reasonable standards that only tourists may use. The infrastructure of many third world countries is concentrated in small areas only benefiting the rich rulers. You cannot compare this spectacle to the actual public infrastructure of "real" countries, including the US. What you speak about can be generally observed in china and the former soviet union with their masses of computer hackers, but then only/mostly among the "educated class". And those aren't really third world countries. Anything below that, and you're too busy farming/too uneducated.

By the way, i am Swedish, so i am neutral in this matter.

--Surreal Puppet

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

Define 3rd world. BTW, I'm part of a so-called 3rd world country and we actually don't have capital punishment here. OTOH, Some 1st and 2nd world countries have it, including some states in the USA. Isn't that a surprise? With all the torture accusations, RIAA and all the wonderful prizes 1st world countries receive, I'd rather stay where I am.

PS: haha

I feel really sorry for everyone with a bit of brain living in the US.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

What your "swedish neutrality" stops your "neutral mind" from realizing is that health care is not measured in how many hospitals you have. What good is a hospital for if it is overspending and undertreating?

Health care is measured in health indicators and system cost. Following that, Cuba presents the world with health indicators that surpass the US along with other european countries like HIV prevalence and child mortality rate, all that while spending a fraction of what the US spends, whether in by patient cost (251 dollars per patient versus 7439 dollars in the US) or by GDP (7.3 versus 19.3 in the US). Heck, Cuba's health care is praised by the UN and some european countries even have agreements with Cuba to fly and treat their citizens there. Are those european countries being fooled by Castro's propaganda?

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[rduke15]

This is completely off-topic, but I can't resist suggesting you check the facts.

Here you can produce your own comparative data: http://www.unicef.org/statistics/index_step1.php?clear_countries=1&clear_regions=1&clear_indicators=1

Obviously, UNICEF doesn't count hospitals. They go after indicators like child mortality rate, life expectancy, etc.

You will notice that Cuba and the US are basically equivalent with such health care indicators, despite the enormous income disparity.
(I added 2 European countries for comparison.)

                                Cuba  US  France  Netherlands
Under-5 mortality rate 2005     7     7   5       5
Under-1 mortality rate 2005     6     6   4       4
Neonatal mortality rate 2000    4     5   3       4
Life expectancy at birth 2005   78   78   80      79

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like in bombs as the trigger device? I know they do that a lot in some third world countries.

What an idiot.

BTW adding more features to a cellphone could actually be a further sign of poverty. In a developed country people buy a PDA and a cell phone, they don't need to save money by getting a super cell. Though they do that now with the Smart phones, which are as good, and available in the US, as any cell phones in the world.

Further sign of poverty? Boy, what an idiot. So, is it a sign of poverty if I purchase a laptop with an internal card reader instead of purchasing an USB dongle? Am I poor if I purchase an iPhone instead of a measly vanilla phone and a MP3 player? Do you even try to think things through?

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Just Some Guy]

On the other end, I'm still driving a '98 Oldsmobile Intrigue because it handles like a dream in the weather we get here, has a great stereo, is incredibly comfortable for tall people, has all the power you could want in a familymobile, and hasn't needed a single repair outside regular maintenance. It's sad to me that Detroit can build good cars when they want to, but would rather concentrate on making Behemoth With Towing Package (And Built-In Tent), and those in non-American plants.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[glitch23]

And you think DVDs are a big deal? Think again. On healthcare for example, we are beaten by Cuba! I guess you are among those who do not believe that some of these so called 3rd world countries are *slightly* ahead of us especially in what a cellphone can be used for. Now, that's a fact.

It's nice to think of the "advantages" of a system in use by another country especially when you conveniently ignore the disadvantages of the same system. In the case of Cuba, I think most people know that it is a communist country. Many people don't want to pay for someone else's healthcare or at least more than they already do in the United States. Socialist programs are not better when you look at the whole picture; they only benefit the poor (or lazy in some cases). The gov't acts as Robin Hood in that case.

A 3rd world country just now building their infrastructure can go straight for the newest technology as long as they can afford it. Current users don't have their service interrupted because there are no current users or existing service. It is a bit harder to do that in the United States. Regulations in the United States are much different in the States than in 3rd world countries which allows them to reduce feature sets without being hurt by their competition. On the surface, you sound like a Democrat by espousing only the advantages of a system (socialized healthcare) that actually isn't any better than what we have in the U.S. when analyzed properly but using them as a reason why it must be better w/o looking at the downsides.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[bogaboga]

Can you explain why Cuba, one of the so called 3rd world countries has a life expectancy equal to that of the USA? Can you?

Yet, you, like most Americans will just say..."Oh it's a communist country...", as if being capitalist helps you when you are dead, or when you have been rejected by insurance companies like so many unfortunate Americans.

BTW, [communist] China now finances our debt! Are you proud of that? The poster just before you has some stats in case you are interested.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[roguetrick]

I still don't understand what the hell you're getting at here. I don't even consider the word 3rd world country to be valid since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I swear to god you just seem to be a random text generator trolling slashdot.

So let me be brief: What the hell are you trying to say that has any relation to the story, whatsoever.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[roguetrick]

Cuba is a damn 2nd world country, not a 3rd world country!

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy troll. Who is modding these things?

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Yold]

you drive a 2007 Lexus GS 450, ~ 50,000 - 60,000 dollars, and you spelled "alone" wrong. You bitch about the direction this country is going in, yet you partake in the excesses of consumerism like most people can only dream. You seem to know it all.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[gregbot9000]

Yeah you are. I don't get people like you, see I was talking about companions and substitution, two basic concepts in economics. I didn't state anything as fact but the theory is sound.

Imagine you have two countries, country A is wealthy and drinks wine, while country B is poor and drinks beer. The Wine costs $30 to get drunk. while the beer 0nly costs $10 to get drunk. Now the poor people start to get a little money and the quality of their beer goes up, because they still can't afford to switch to wine, and soon the quality of beer produced in country B surpass that of beer made in country A. Country B takes this as a sign that they have, in some way, beaten country A. while in fact it is actually proof that they have not.

I was suggesting that, maybe, cellphones are nicer in other countries because in the US we all have laptops and the phone is secondary, which is a valid theory, despite your anti-rational stance that disagreement = wrong.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[freedom_india]

What is the point you are trying to say dumbass?

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuses backed up by imaginary situations don't really show anything, much less prove anything.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[gregbot9000]

yeah I hate math too.

Re:So it's not only the the 3rd world after all!

[Anonymous Coward]

You think the stats coming out of Cuba are any more real than the ones that came out of the DDR or SSSR?

hmmm

[thatskinnyguy]

Couldn't they just have their local forensics lab run FTK on it? I mean, it has saved me and those I work for tons of frustration thanks to stuff like this.

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the problem was decryption, but more of data recovery.

Re:hmmm

[thatskinnyguy]

That's exactly what I use it for. Data recovery is what FTK does best. I have other things to defeat encryption. I don't know why I was tagged flamebait for that.

Re:hmmm

[cdrguru]

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.

Re:hmmm

[thatskinnyguy]

Your prices are unbelievably reasonable. I'll have to pick up a copy and see for myself.

Warning: Known sockpuppet/troll

[Anonymous Coward]

User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.

Re:Warning: Known sockpuppet/troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter-bashing is so 2007.

Get a life already.

Or just FOAD.

forced or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

So did the video confirm that her original testimony was that she was forced? If so, that cop should be on permanent traffic duty.

Re:forced or not?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? Cops are never punished for anything.

HOW was Only Meta-Data was damaged?

[Anonymous Coward]

And, if the DVD was written correctly to begin with, how did JUST the "Directory tree" lead-in get messed up on the DVD?

The real (and more likely) reason?

Maybe someone forgot to hit Finalize after the dvdcam was done recording! The lead-in was never there!

"But it played fine when we watched it back in the camera... I don't know WHY it won't play in the player! It must be corrupted!"

Re:HOW was Only Meta-Data was damaged?

[gregbot9000]

You know, I've recorded 100's of hours of material and I never had that problem. Maybe when peoples lives are on the line they should stick to more proven analog technology and let it be the family that loses their trip to Disneyland to test the waters of the new tech?

Re:HOW was Only Meta-Data was damaged?

[dgatwood]

Probably, yeah. In the worst case, though, the disc might have gotten finalized incorrectly (e.g. using a bad optical drive), in which case even the original DVD burner might not play it....

The lead-in area (at least for the first session) is the innermost recordable portion of the media. If something went wrong in media fabrication, I'd expect that to be the second-most likely part to have problems, second only to the outer edge (which fails verification frequently in cheap media). So this could have been a media defect as well.

I'm not surprised the Seagate folks were able to recover the data. This pales compared with what the Seagate recovery folks deal with every day--head crashes, surface mount desoldering and replacing defective head preamps, maybe even electron microscope recovery of shattered platters.... Compared with that, a few bad blocks in the lead-in of a DVD is downright trivial and might even be recoverable without hacking the drive firmware....

That said, I sure would like to know who the two companies are that couldn't figure this out so I can never send anything to them.... :-)

Re:HOW was Only Meta-Data was damaged?

[Anonymous Coward]

are. you. insane?!!

you can't put an innocent family through that kind of torment.

why do you hate america?

One backup copy is never enough

[NotQuiteReal]

You need more than one copy of your data. At least one of the copies needs to be off site. If this is not the case, it is not backed up.

Re:One backup copy is never enough

[gregbot9000]

More then one copy? How about someone writing what she said, or at least the key points like whether or not she used the word forced.

Re:One backup copy is never enough

[fafaforza]

How would you forsee what point would be in contention months later to include it in the "key points" jotted down on a pad?

Re:One backup copy is never enough

[gregbot9000]

Use the 5 W's: who, what, where, when, why.

That would fall under what, which is: forced me to have sex.

I worked as a security guard we learned quickly what key points were in an incident and what Exact phrases used were. The cop must have had better training then us. He knew, he was just made complacent by a technological crutch.

Re:One backup copy is never enough

[Anonymous Coward]

You need more than one copy of your data. At least one of the copies needs to be off site. If this is not the case, it is not backed up.

Its not backup up unless you've got it copied on to tape drives stored in nuclear proof bunkers under the mountains of Slovakia.

Re:The data isn't gone until....

[gardyloo]

Funny... I had a head crash once, and my girlfriend got pregnant.

Disc wasn't finalized

[CyberZCat]

This is a very common problem that happens when a disc isn't finalized on both audio CDs and video DVDs that are recorded on direct to disc consumer recording systems. After a the actual data is written what is a essentially a "table of contents" has to be written at the beginning of the disc, otherwise you get the "blank disc" effect as describe here. That two separate data specialists couldn't figure this out is rather concerning...

Dust on media

[troll8901]

I've tried. Neither 16X DVD nor 40X CD can fling any dust off. You'll need tissue and physical contact.

Re:Dust on media

[Chris Tucker]

Usually it's physical contact first, THEN the tissue.

Re:Dust on media

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Not for me :(

Re:Dust on media

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like a tissue and some physical contact please.

Re:Dust on media

[troll8901]

The last I measured, the center hole's diameter was about 0.59 inches across.

I'm surprised.

[Facegarden]

Santa Cruz is 25-30 minutes from Silicon Valley, I'm really surprised there was seemingly only one competent data recovery firm nearby. Chances are there was more, but the D.A. just didn't find them. Still, i'm surprised that it took two years to find one.
-Taylor

Help!

[Ecuador]

...As a result, Barnes' lawyers claimed that the victim's original police interview, as police remembered it, would have been inconsistent with her trial testimony and therefore would be exculpatory evidence...

Ok, enough with the data recovery stuff. Can someone please explain to me why the victim was not allowed to testify? I tried to understand but it really is beyond me. Maybe someone can help out with a simple car analogy etc.
Obviously this is THE LAST time I RTFA. As a /.er I should have known better...

Re:Help!

[eh2o]

Quite simple. *Never* talk to the police. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

Re:Help!

[gnasher719]

Ok, enough with the data recovery stuff. Can someone please explain to me why the victim was not allowed to testify? I tried to understand but it really is beyond me. Maybe someone can help out with a simple car analogy etc.

The woman was interviewed, the interview recorded on DVD, and the DVD was lost. The vague recollection of a policeman who was present was that she had said in the interview that she wasn't forced. Later she said that she was forced. Now this looks like there is conflicting evidence, and the police conveniently lost the evidence that was speaking _for_ the accused. If the vague recollection of the policeman was right, and if she then was allowed to testify again, there would have been two conflicting testimonies. One that says the accused was innocent, testimony conveniently lost and not shown to the jury, and one that says he is guilty, testimony proudly presented to the jury. I can see how the judge wouldn't see that as a fair trial.

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not very good at "simple car analogies", but the reason she wasn't allowed to testify seems pretty straightforward - she'd been interviewed by police who said that she didn't say she'd been forced into sex. She was going to testify that she was. Without the DVD evidence, this looks very much like she was changing her story when going to court, therefore the judge didn't allow it. With the recovery of the data, her planned court testimony could be shown to be consistent with the testimony given to the police.

As to the data recovery - it does sound odd - in the UK there are a couple of serious effective companies who do data recovery (and charge a fortune) and are used regularly by the police. The idea of sending the disk to the local mom & pop data recovery operation in such a serious case is pretty appalling.

Re:Help!

[grumbel]

Don't they take notes or stuff? Human memory isn't exactly the most accurate way to store data and if they can't even remember which the guilty party is they better should keep pen and paper handy.

Re:Help!

[Jurily]

We're sorry, this video is no longer available.

Re:Help!

[Cow Jones]

We're sorry, this video is no longer available.

It's available just fine for me. Try using a proxy; YouTube sometimes use GeoIP data to determine whether a video should be available to you, at your location.

CJ

Re:Help!

[LordKronos]

They do better than just take notes. They record the whole thing on DVD.

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

The victim's testimony was excluded because she had talked to the police and the police had misremembered what she said.

How the fuck is "never talk to the police" good advice for rape victims?

Re:Help!

[Ash-Fox]

They do better than just take notes. They record the whole thing on DVD.

Does it contain bonus scenes?

Re:Help!

[buttersnout]

Right. How can a witness say she was raped, clearly enough that the defendant confessed and the officer recalls her saying she was never forced in that interview. Don't say his memory was fuzzy or anything because there is no way a fuzzy memory of maybe not recalling a woman saying she was raped should exclude her testimony. We live in a society where people either as incompetent or as biased for whatever reason can be cops. Their testimony is considered more credible than any physical evidence or the testimony of witnesses and victims.

Re:Help!

[Ecuador]

Are you telling me that the judicial system does not trust sworn testimonies? I might see some point if the first testimony was also sword, however if the policeman was not sure it still would not make sense to disallow a sworn testimony. If that is so, let's throw away ALL testimonies.
Also, does everyone know what the witnesses etc will say even before the trial? Are all the courtroom dramas with the suspense of what the witness will testify so far from reality? Why even have the trial?
Finally, I also don't get how a policeman remembers that a rape victim told them she was not forced (i.e. was not a rape victim). Isn't it obvious this policeman was helping the defense? Shouldn't he be prosecuted?
Or maybe lawyer stuff don't fit my logic...

Re:Help!

[denzacar]

Your first sentence answered the question you made in your second sentence. Watch the above linked video for clarification.
Based on the fact that a cop DOES NOT LIE, when the rape victim steps into that box, swears and then says that the cop (who does not lie - EVER) said something wrong - rape victim can end up in jail for purgery.
Or at best, just make a fool of themselves and made to appear like someone who goes around accusing innocent people for no reason.

Correct way is to talk to a lawyer hired by you or appointed to you and have him/her talk to the police.
Naturally, a lawyer that has two things. YOUR best interest in mind and a BRAIN.

Re:Help!

[visible.frylock]

FYI, that can happen and 99% of the time, it's fixed for me by just reloading. Makes me think it has to do with a timeout.

Re:Help!

[JohnnyBGod]

Mod parent up! That advice is meant for people who can become suspects of the crime.

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. The article stated this quite clearly. She was not allowed to testify AGAIN. Because she already testified and admitted that she was not forced to have sex. So, she either committed perjury in favour of her attacker then (unlikely), or is now lying about being raped. I'm sure a lot of people will call me misogynistic, but I've looked at a lot of rape cases over my life and my personal opinion is that half the time, the sex was consensual and now the woman is lying saying she was raped, to save her virtue, to get money, to punish an ex she no longer likes, etc. Women are like this. They will ruin a life at the drop of a hat if they're feeling a mite vindictive. Or can you recollect ANY notable rape cases where the victim is male? Sure it happens, but since men are usually pursuers of sex anyway, we don't feel the need to make it up when it didn't.

try the disk first

[amclay]

I'm still trying to figure out if they tested the disk in a player BEFORE the court room.

Actually I thought...

[supaneko]

It was for kitty pr0n!

Title and Summary completely wrong

[evilviper]

It's not at all true that the DA was depending on the DVD... In fact the defense just made an issue that the DA had evidence on the DVD that might point to a key witness changing her story. Since they couldn't turn over a copy of the evidence in a usable form, it became a real problem.

If the DVD didn't exist in the first place, the DA would have been better off.

Sounds about right

[Gazzonyx]

No doubt, even without a TOC or any kind of analysis other than a raw disk dump, the fact that the thing had structure should have been the first clue.

I used to do the audio booth at my church for live concerts and the such, and those direct to disk recorders are a pain (or at least the one we used). If you pause them and then try to start them again while they're closing the track, or something to that effect, sometimes they'll merge tracks or not close at all - but the stream is always there, if somewhat incoherent.

I regularly forget/neglect to close my audio and data disks and I've found that free-as-in-beer/donationware 'ISOBuster' always does the trick (or 'dd'/'ddrescue', I've pulled data from a scrambled reiserfs before this way, I'd wager it'd work for ISOs, too). At any rate, this task should not have been a challenge for even a freshman CS student with some free tools and an hour to kill.

Re:A cheap drill

[symbolic]

..and one or two holes: point, set, and match.

NOT an anti-MS bash!

[rts008]

"Probably, yeah. In the worst case, though, the disc might have gotten finalized incorrectly (e.g. using a bad optical drive), in which case even the original DVD burner might not play it....

The lead-in area (at least for the first session) is the innermost recordable portion of the media. If something went wrong in media fabrication, I'd expect that to be the second-most likely part to have problems, second only to the outer edge (which fails verification frequently in cheap media). So this could have been a media defect as well."

*disclaimer*
This is only my limited experience, so take with a grain of salt....

I have had this very problem in the past, and can currently reproduce it at will today.

Facts:
1. 100 disc stack of blank CD-R | 1x-52x, 700MB, 80 minute Imation (tm) discs.
2. at the time troubles started:
    a. One PC (500MHz P3 slot A, 768MB PC 100 RAM, CyberDrv CW058D CD-R/Rw @ 32x/12x/48x cd drive, Win XP Pro SP2, Nero 7
    b. Dell desktop: 1.8 GHz AMD Athlon, 1GB PC 2700 RAM, Sony DRUxxx? DVD-+r/rw 4x burner, Win XP SP2, MyDVD-came with drive
    c. P4 Prescott socket 478 3.0 GHz, 1 GB PC 2700 RAM, Lite-on DVD-ROM/CD-+r/rw, Kubuntu 6.10 Dapper Drake, K3b.

Results:
2.a,b. would not even recognize the discs, c. would use and burn with no problem.

The perplexing thing is after I burnt a disc in Kubuntu, it would then 'work' in the other two Win XP machines, but the two XP machines refused to use the Imation blanks.

Since then, b.(above) has been dual boot with XP SP2, and Kubuntu 8.04, and XP refuses to recognize the blanks, while Kubuntu/K3b on the same hardware uses them with no problem.

The MEDIA used CAN make a big difference here, as I have found out the hard way.

If I had mod points, I would have given you some '+1 Insightful' love, but alas, this lame reply is the best I can currently do for now.

Re:NOT an anti-MS bash!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just trying to figure out your title...

NOT an anti-MS bash!

The "NOT" and "anti-" make for a double-negative.. Take those out and you're left with "an MS bash!"

Zomg! Mod parent +1 flamebait!

Oh stop your bitching.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was your ass this man had violently shoved his penis into against your will, I'm sure you'd want to see him rot in prison at all costs.

They tried a different DVD player. That's all

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times have we tried a DVD which wouldn't play, only to find that it plays in another player. It's no big deal.

If they're trying to imply that they used an electron microscope or some other fangled bit of gadgetry then I am afraid they aren't fooling this person!

data recovery 101 ..

[rs232]

"once SRS extracted an image of the data from the DVD, it was able to repair the damaged lead-in portion of the DVD, making the data -- which had always been intact -- viewable"

Why is this deemed worthy of a slashdot posting, any competent techie could have done the same ..

access denied diagram ..

[rs232]

"it's wide and dust simply reduces its intensity at the focused point (diagram)"

'Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /articles/sony_bwu-100a_blu-ray_drive/laser_comparison.jpg on this server'

C4! Dynamite !

[freaker_TuC]

C4 solves all your data retency problems!

I've seen the actual recovered video

[transporter_ii]

The whole thing is rather suspicious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z-Ud8rbt4Q

Everyone is always quick with the tin-foil hat jokes, but sometimes they really are out to get you...

.

You seem to be extremely stupid

[GuloGulo]

"Funny how everyone here is fully aware of the capabilities of our current state of technology in the hands of people with enough resources, yet when someone suggests an actual, real-world possibility for misuse, or the possibility of despotism it's "tinfoil hat" time.

I'm not saying they're doing it to me, or that they're in the walls, but seriously, have those lessons of the mccarthy and now bush eras gone straight out the other ear? "

No.

We just recognize the stupidity of suggesting a pissant operation like the one in TFA could believably produce something that would fool a blind retard, much less an entire jury, and all the assorted individuals involved in such a case.

You don't seem smart enough to recognize such stupidity, and seem to think the foil hat comment was directed toward something that should actually be given any kind of serious consideration, instead of being dismissed like the farcical idiocy it is.

I have to wonder what is wrong with you that you find the need to rant against the dismissal of what is, without doubt, a moronic assertion in the first place.

Re:You seem to be extremely stupid

[plasmacutter]

We just recognize the stupidity of suggesting a pissant operation like the one in TFA could believably produce something that would fool a blind retard, much less an entire jury, and all the assorted individuals involved in such a case.

because if the government wanted to shut someone up, it would be ONLY that pissant operation, and not the pissant operation acting by proxy right?

I have to wonder what is wrong with you that you find the need to rant against the dismissal of what is, without doubt, a moronic assertion in the first place.

someone has never been on the butt end of national:local:social: office:schoolyard politics before, oh wait if you post here you have. Maybe you just don't remember it?

I suggest you learn WTF you're talking about.

[GuloGulo]

"This is completely off-topic, but I can't resist suggesting you check the facts."

This is completely on topic, but I suggest you stop making an ass of yourself by cherrypicking statistics, then suggesting arrogantly that someone else "check the facts" when you're too ignorant to do so yourself.

Look into abortion rates. Then look into how infant mortality is defined.

Guess what? The US has a low abortion rate, whereas other countries will much more frequently abort in cases of prenatal birth defect.

Think about that EXTENSIVELY before you use statistics to prove your point, or else you'll get stuck making an assertion like "the US and Cuba are basically equivalent" when you're patently wrong, AND DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY.

They are NOT equivalent, unless the definition of equivalent has changed recently and allows for entirely disparate comparisions to be "equivalent".