Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
"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.
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.
For best results, one should loosen their tin-foil hat occasionally.
Just sayin'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It had better be enough for them, because they won't be getting another call.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
The game.
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.)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I'm curious, but are you insane?
Is the answer to your question: They wouldn't use DVDs?
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
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!"
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.
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.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
While I am shocked, I am not that surprised at all.
...and I am puzzled as to how that works out!
To reign is to serve.
Funny... I had a head crash once, and my girlfriend got pregnant.
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...
I've tried. Neither 16X DVD nor 40X CD can fling any dust off. You'll need tissue and physical contact.
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!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
=)
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Microwave 5 seconds.
...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. /.er I should have known better...
Obviously this is THE LAST time I RTFA. As a
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I'm still trying to figure out if they tested the disk in a player BEFORE the court room.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
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.
It was for kitty pr0n!
Less-geeky computer repair alternative for Lansing, MI
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
ah, a perfect example of cloud computing. ladies and gentlemen, i give you the future
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.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
..and one or two holes: point, set, and match.
"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.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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.
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
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"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
davecb5620@gmail.com
"it's wide and dust simply reduces its intensity at the focused point (diagram)"
/articles/sony_bwu-100a_blu-ray_drive/laser_comparison.jpg on this server'
'Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
davecb5620@gmail.com
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.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
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.
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.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
C4 solves all your data retency problems!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
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...
.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
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.
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.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Cuba is a damn 2nd world country, not a 3rd world country!
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
The government shreds their papers and discs into very small pieces, and then burns them.
We've recovered the one-time pad he used, your honor, and it proves he is guilty!
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.
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.
What is the point you are trying to say dumbass?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
"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.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
"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".
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
yeah I hate math too.