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Yahoo Ordered to Show How It Recovered 'Deleted' Emails (pcmag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine:
Just what kind of email retentions powers does Yahoo have? According to a policy guide from the company, Yahoo cannot recover emails that have been deleted from a user's account -- simple as that. If the email is in a user's account, it's fair game, and Yahoo can even give law enforcement the IP address of whatever computer is being used to send said email.
Or, at least, that's what Yahoo has said. A magistrate judge from the Northern District of California has ordered Yahoo to produce documents, as well as a witness for deposition, related to the company's ability to recover seemingly deleted emails in a UK drug case... a UK defendant was convicted -- and is currently serving an extra 20-year prison sentence -- as part of a conspiracy to import drugs into the United Kingdom. He's currently appealing the conviction, in part because the means by which Yahoo recovered the emails in question allegedly violate British law.
The drug smugglers apparently communicated by creating a draft of an email, which was then available to others who logged into that same account.
Or, at least, that's what Yahoo has said. A magistrate judge from the Northern District of California has ordered Yahoo to produce documents, as well as a witness for deposition, related to the company's ability to recover seemingly deleted emails in a UK drug case... a UK defendant was convicted -- and is currently serving an extra 20-year prison sentence -- as part of a conspiracy to import drugs into the United Kingdom. He's currently appealing the conviction, in part because the means by which Yahoo recovered the emails in question allegedly violate British law.
The drug smugglers apparently communicated by creating a draft of an email, which was then available to others who logged into that same account.
" communicated by creating a draft of an email, which was then available to others who logged into that same account." Crikey! That trick is as old as they come!
That's the same method David Petraeus used.
in the fact that an international drug smuggler wants to appeal his conviction by arguing that Yahoo! "broke the law". I understand the legal reasoning behind it, but if it were Hollywood, not real life, his request would most likely be met with a punch to the face marking the end of the scene.
In the best case, Yahoo recovered them from tape, in the worst case they actually keep stuff around for various nefarious purposes. My bet is that they're doing both for their customers and simply lying about it to their products.
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Some exec says they can't recover anything deleted from the servers until one of the sysadmins points out that the server backup archives don't process these deletion requests retroactively.
If you give your email to a data broker company such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, or whoever... then they have it. What happens to it is now out of your hands. They don't have to delete it, and in fact probably they will not because it holds commercial value for them. They will just flag it so it doesn't show up for you.
if you don't want these companies to have your data, do not give it to them. Really, this is not a complicated concept. End to end encrypt with PGP or whatever and send your data from your own computer to the recipient's own computer. No one in the middle will be able to read it that way. If you give it to people in the middle unencrypted, then they can read it.
Really people. The internet is 47 years old. Email is 45 years old. That's longer than the lifetime of most people now using it. There is simply no more excuse for not having even the most basic comprehension of how it works. You don't have to be a programmer. You don't have to design bloody CPUs. It isn't rocket science to have a tiny little glimmer of knowledge about what happens to your data, and how you can keep it private if that's what you want.
Can you hear me now?
It seems really clear that they can get out of this one easy. It was not deleted, it was never sent, thus it was just a discarded draft, and not in violation of any rule they set about deleted emails. An email has been sent, whereas a draft is not an email.
It's technically not an email until you hit the send button.
I do not know the technical term, but perhaps this is a case where evidence illegally obtained was used to find some criminal, and later a new plausible evidence trail was magically created.
If you forecast that it's going to be sunny, and it rains, everyone is mad at you. If you forecast it'll rain, but it turns out sunny, people might be bothered, but aren't angry. So you over forecast rain predictions.
And then if you're running a free email service, and can recover some deleted items, but don't want to make promises about whatever internal garbage collection process you're using (and want the freedom to change it whenever you want), you say that you can never recover deleted items. That way if you legitimately can't recover it you can say that you never promised that you could. But then when one is recoverable, you can claim it good luck.
For all we know, a regression was introduced at just the right time, and items weren't getting garbage collected like they were supposed to, and Yahoo! was able to take advantage of that accident in this case.
Portmanteau doesn't mean what you appear to think it means. Well, maybe for 'left-tards'.
I am always amazed at how low we have come down in terms of demonizing opponents. At least with racist remarks about Obama were accurate, in that he is in fact African American. But Hillary a shill? compared to a businessman known for lying to get a deal? are you really that much of a retard?
It is so bad that no developer in our company has used Mozy to recovery anything successfully. You launch the recovery dialog, wait for it to populate the file tree and recovery sets. It spins and spins and spins. We give up. It seems to be some tool meant for office application, some spreadsheets and documents all manually created. How many documents can you physically type up every day? It works at that load. Deployed on a development work station, that downloads some 45 GB of source code in some 20 repos, with daily pulls and rebases, developers maintaining multiple views, running regression suites and unit tests, we easily generate 10 GB of data per day per developer spanning easily 20000 machine generated files. All I touched were three source files, and approved one pull request, boom 10GB!
Yahoo emails are all manually typed. It does not have to contend with this level of machine generated derived objects and data files. But it is not dealing with a 200 developers, it is dealing with several million users. They could be churning through this much of data in their image files and video/audio clips. It will take significant effort and cost to recover anything from backups.
There is however, one developer who actually found something very interesting. We don't have wait for the recovery sets dialog to populate. If you know precisely the entire absolute path name to a file that was deleted you could type it as the wheel it spinning and it can be found relatively easily, he said. So yeah, if you know precisely the name of the blob that want to recovery, may be you can. But to go on a fishing expedition finding all files that existed on a particular day it well nigh impossible.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It really depends on how often the backups are done, and how long they are kept. I remember for an old mainframe system they were done hourly, but with only 7 days kept. Other will have a lower frequency. But usually they are not kept forever, are usually overwritten as a sort of rolling backup. Now I could be wrong and yahoo could be saving a few terrabyte forever on regular basis but it sounds dubious as there is no commercial interest for this, this is why most ISP and firms fought plans to be forced to keep backups of some data , including logs, for a long time. It cost a lot of money. So yes delete are not committed retroactively, but after a while they become a de facto reality.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
This happened to me a few years ago.
Internally Google uses a version of Gmail. When someone subpoenas emails Google performs keyword search on employees' accounts. The found emails are labeled "litigation hold". G does not tell employees when it happens. One day an employee just sees a new label and a bunch of emails archived under that label. When it happened to me I saw not just the emails that I mailed but also ****every draft of every email***. Every autosaved draft was filed in that folder. Not just the final mailed version or the final draft. EVERY EFFING DRAFT of every email. When I asked I was told it was a bug.
Anyone who has seen a DB dump from wordpress can immediately identify how this was done. Yahoo keeps "drafts" until the email is sent. Every time that draft is opened, a new version is made in case the user decides to "cancel"
As a few commentators will likely mention, "cloud services" are not secure, nor will they ever be secure. If you want to make sure that you are communicating securely, you use the SSL POP3/SMTP service directly from your computer, and delete the message afterwards.
That's completely different, a shill is someone who secretly works for a company (eg. Monsanto). Trump might be an asshole, but he's not a shill
Ugh, Bit9 is pure evil, from a programmer POV.
It hashes every file you read and write and denies you access to them.
We had that configured on a whitelist basis. The programmers had the option of overriding it, but as you can imagine, clicking through a dialog every time you make a 1-char change to every script file can be quite frustrating.
It also took a file-heavy process that used to run in 90 seconds and made it consume 14 minutes.
Yahoo said they cannot recover deleted emails. They say nothing about recovering deleted drafts.
An email is the act of sending information from one account to another. It is nothing more than a set of transactions between servers along with a payload.
A draft, however, is a document or file stored on a server that is waiting to be sent as a payload. It is not in itself an email. So, when Yahoo says they cannot recover deleted emails, it says nothing to their ability to recover other deleted information that is NOT email, such as a draft.
When you're conducting a criminal enterprise, it is important to know that words mean things, and that you should not assume something is what it isn't, or isn't what it is, just because you would like it to be that way. When involved in such activity, you should think more like a lawyer, because they're the ones that are going to garnish you with minced words, chew you up, and spit you out, when you make silly assumptions.
Remember, the law is designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to assist the state in removing you from your freedom at its whimsy. It is virtually impossible to live a day in a 1st World nation without breaking several laws that could results in you losing your freedom.
One great book that discusses this is Harvey Silverglate's "Three Felonies a Day." It comes highly recommended for anyone concerned about the rise of seemingly infinite and unchecked State power and how it is used against ordinary citizens as a means of control.
Stego man, stego.
But does opened always mean read?
How does one prove a person actually READ an email even if it was opened?
I've not read many emails even though they were opened!