TiVo

The book I read to research this post was TiVo for Dummies by Andy Rathbone which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. They don't sell TiVo's in Britain any more although at the time of this books publication they were still supported. They were still selling them in the USA although they weren't selling them anywhere else. The TiVo was a landmark in dvr's or pvr's because you could select a programme to record by its name rather than the time of the broadcast, what channel it's on etc. You can select a programme according to who stars in it, who directed it etc. For example if you are a Bette Davis you can programme it to record any film she stars in. Also there's the season pass feature for example if you are an NCIS fan you can programme it to tape just the latest series, repeats & previous series are ignored. Another feature the TiVo has is HMO or Home Media Organiser which lets you play files from your computer. The TiVo is fully compatible with the AppleMac but isn't compatible with the Media Player in Windows so you need third party software. Some companies will upgrade the hard drive on the TiVo & if you do this you will usually have to send it away. These hard drives are substantially bigger than the one that comes with your TiVo. When you buy a TiVo you must connect it to the phone line or internet to download the latest software & updates although any phone line will do. It can even be a friends phoneline. Some TiVo's work with satelitte television & the process of recording these programmes is simpler. Also there are 2 major types of TiVo the class 1 & class 2 & the class 1 is a lot older & hasn't got all the features of the later type.

Evernote

The book I read to research this post was Evernote for Dummies by David Y A Sarna which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. Believe it or not I had never heard of the Evernote software or website until I noticed this book was in the Top 10 of the computing book chart on Kindle. It piqued my interest I then visited the website & signed up on a basic free account & decided to buy the book. Evernote is a note taking program in either online or software which you download form. Tens of millions of people have downloaded the software. The beauty of Evernote though is that you can synchronize practically any smartphone, tablet or computer built in the last few years to access your account. It even works with AppleMacs & one point I'd better make is not all the features work with every platform. You can use it with Twitter. You simply type @dmEN to send a message to Evernote. In addition if you follow @myEN your tweets will automatically be copied into the online form of Evernote if you have it. You can copy information to and from Facebook & it's possible to set it up to do the same with a blog. Also you can search through your notes by keyword. If you think of the alternative that you have hundreds of pieces of paper on your desk & it takes you about an hour to find what you want, I think Evernote makes sense. Also you can upload things like photos & pdf's. There is a premium version & you can upload upto 1,024 MB of data using that per day. There's a file limitation of 25 MB with the basic account & 50 MB with the premium. Your total amount of space you can take up is unlimited on both accounts. Some companies have written 3rd party programs like Eventnote which only works with Google Chrome but is a calendar planning program.

Motorcycling

The book I read to research this post was Motorcycling for Dummies by Bill Kresnak which is an excellent book which I borrowed from the library. Some people can't understand the attraction of motorcycles especially when you consider how unsafe they are compared to cars. I think if you are sensible there not as dangerous as they are reputed to be. I drive a Ford Fiesta at the moment but when I first got mobile I had a moped. I think aside from the fact that Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt have motorbikes as do many celebrities there main attraction is there value for money. If you buy a high performance car you will pay a heck of a lot of money, for around £8,000 you can buy a brand new high performance bike. That high performance bike will do 0-60 mph in around 3 seconds which believe me will leave even a ferrari for dust. Also that high performance will typically do 45 miles per gallon, a standard bike will do a lot more. Because a motorbike is much lighter than a car it can have a much less powerful engine but be much quicker than a car. A friend of mine has a racing bike but I can't remember what model but anyone he had it rechipped so that it was more powerful in the mid ranges but had a lower top speed. I think that's a good idea because let's face it you're not going to do 180mph on british roads.
In 1947 a large group of touring motorcyclists went into a town called Hollister in the USA & although a few of them had a bit too much to drink they didn't cause much trouble. Anyway a newspaper set up a photo of a biker leaning back on the seat of his motorbike drinking a bottle of beer & made out there was motorbike gangs going around terrorizing american towns. Almost overnight motorcycle gangs were born although most didn't go looking for trouble. This incident was glamorized in the film The Wild Ones starring Marlon Brando. It's interesting to note Malcolm Forbes a successful millionaire used to be in a motorcycle club & he often used to have Elizabeth Taylor the actress as a passenger.

The book I read to research this post was Virtualization & Forensics by Diane Barrett et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is relevant to anyone connected to virtualization or cloud computing not just computer forensics personnel. There's a lot of general information on things like virtualization. Xen Server pronounced zen is an open source virtualization program that mostly with linux. Virtual PC which is by Microsoft allows AppleMacs to run windows & although it's compatible with some variations of Linux they are not officially supported. Penguin SleuthKit includes MD5 which images hard drives, SleuthKit is a forensic open source tool which can be run as a live program which means you can boot it from a USB flash drive. SleuthKit includes everything you need to do a forensic examination. An important point is if you are doing a forensic examination for legal purposes you must not change anything on the target computer unless it's to get it working. If you make big changes even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the evidence it's highly unlikely the court will accept it as admissable evidence. Virtualization allows you also to run suspect software in a sandbox environment which is useful if you suspect it of being virus infected. An important point concerning virtualization & cloud computing is in the coming years laws will have to be made to clarify things but at the moment it's unclear how law enforcement agencies can gain access to a criminals cloud account. At the moment it's often left alone. One particular problem is if a criminal lives in Britain but the cloud server is in the USA which country has jurisdiction. Many virtualization products allow for example you to run a server operating system on a desktop pc & often it avoids the need for special hardware. A new development is the idea of a pc which doesn't even have a processor but is powered by the cloud service. Obviously these present problems to the computer forensics personnel who may be familiar with them. Also they call virtualization products which work directly with your hardware, class 1 & products which run directly on your operating system, class 2. A virtualization product that allows you to run a different operating system on your computer is called a hyper-visor.

Einstein

The book I read to research this post was Einstein for Dummies by Carlos I Calle which is a excellent book which I bought from Kindle. One thing I want to mention is if you go to the Kindle homepage on the Amazon web site they do what they call a daily deal, that's not how I got this book, but I've noticed the daily deal which changes each day is often an ebook that Kindle normally sell for approximately 5 pounds & they often do them on the daily deal for 99 pence & they seem to do a good variety over several days.
Anyway getting back to Einstein he was born in Ulm in Germany to jewish parents & a year later they moved to Munich. Despite them being they weren't very religious & sent him to a catholic school which had lower tuition fees & was a better school than the nearest jewish school. They thought Einstein had learning difficulties because he was slow learning to talk. A lot of what helped him academically was his mother gave him a magnetic compass which fascinated. He started learning all he could about how compasses worked & electromagnetism, then he started learning physics & maths & went on from there. The schools he went to were very strict regimes & he rebelled against that. His greek teacher said that he would never amount to anything & he hated ancient greek. A bit before he went to university which was in Zurich, Switzerland he left school & tutored himself. When he went to the university he was just 16 & took the entrance exam 2 years early which he failed part but impressed them so much with his knowledge of maths & physics that one of the professors let him join his class. He was still a bit of a rebel & only went to lectures that he thought were interesting & if he liked the lecturer. As a result of this he had to borrow his friends notes & cram all his revision into towards the end of the course. Despite this he came 1st in the 1st year exams & did pass his degree. He wanted a research job with a university but one of his lecturers whom he didn't get on with put all the universities off hiring him. Instead he got a job in the Patents Office in Berne which left him plenty of time to do research. 1905 is often called the year of miracles because it's the year Einstein got 6 papers published that turned Physics on its head. He also won the Nobel Prize for Physics that year which is amazing when you consider he wasn't working in a university research lab. That year he also submitted one of his papers as a dissertation for his doctorate which was accepted. Later on he was instrumental in getting the americans to work on the atomic bomb during World War 2 & has said he wouldn't have bothered if he had known the germans wouldn't be able to develop it. He died in 1955.

iPhone Forensics

The book I read to research this post was iPhone Forensics by Jonathan Zdziarski which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. Some examples where iPhones forensics are in a stalking case it maybe necessary to prove someone phoned someone repeatedly or in a drug case that someone used google maps to locate where a dealer lived so he could buy drugs. Some criminals are crafty something often heard is the phone isn't mine I merely got it off someone who owed me money. This can often be proven one way or another by checking if the firmware has been updated via computer & it leaves a trace as to which computer it is. It's necessary to make at least 3 copies of the hard drive on an iPhone when doing digital forensics. One to archive, one to work with & one for if the defence want to get an expert to examine it. You mustn't change anything when copying it which means using some kind of write blocker & disabling it from the network so that no one can phone it. Usually when you copy an iPhone you do it by wireless as it is more straightforward than using the serial port. The copy is normally done using MD5 software. The digital discovery is mostly done using an open source tool called iLiberty+. Any databases like phone number history or browser history will be done using SQLite. Finally unless the phone is unusable it's vital you don't upgrade the firmware as in particular it can rename files which makes your job more difficult. One other point is you can't take too many notes & it's vital you can answer any of the defences questions as otherwise they can have your evidence thrown out.

Zune

The book I read to research this post was Zune for Dummies by Brian Johnson et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. I have an iPod & don't own a zune but thought this book would be interesting nonetheless. The zune comes in 3 colours, black, white & brown & contains 30 Gb of memory. It has a kind of translucent coating which makes the colour change slightly in different light conditions. It comes with some mp3's of some music by some indie bands, it has several pop videos including Faster Pussycat Kill by Paul Oakenfold ft Britney Murphy which was quite successful in the British pop charts, also it has a skateboarding video & one on snowboarding which might not be to everyones taste but shows off its capabilities. The zune comes with a driver & software which you can install on a computer & it allows you to use zune marketplace. If you have a cd collection you can rip it onto your zune like with an iPod. You aren't supposed to rip dvds onto your zune as it's illegal but there's some software from xilisoft that does that it's called DVD to Zune Converter. You can rip home movies onto your zune but you might have to convert them to a compatible format such as AVI or MP4. There's a program called Video Inspector that will identify what format a video is in. You can download podcasts from iTunes & play them on your zune but the other stuff is incompatible. You can buy a voucher for use with Zune Marketplace which is also compatible with Xbox Live. You can buy a zune dock which will charge your zune & also lets you play music through it. They do AV cables which let you watch zune videos on your television. Finally the headphones that come with it may be a bit basic & you might want to upgrade to some noise cancelling ones.

Green IT

The book I read to research this post was Green IT for Dummies by Carol Baroudi which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This book differs from Green Home Computing for Dummies in that it concerns the data center environment. The biggest bill for most data centers is the electricity bill which can be offset in a green way by having solar panels or a wind turbine. Most data centers have diesel generators in case of power outage. Another big cost is cooling if the density of the computing power exceeds 200 Watts per square foot you need liquid cooling rather than fan cooling. Some companies use something like a canal or a lake where the water can be taken deep down where it's coolest & circulated around the plant. There are often restrictions on this like the water can't be heated to the extent that it kills living organisms. Often a data center will have a cooling tower on its roof to cool the water especially in moderately cold climates. Another development is virtualization which allows programs like exchange server & sharepoint server which at one time would have been run on separate servers to be run on the same server. Another point is the price per Gigabyte of hard drives has come down although there was a glitch when they had the floods in Thailand. Apparently most hard drives are manufactured there. A lot of companies use workstations that are thin clients which the programs are either run on either a cloud server or a company, this requires less maintenance. A final issue is netbooks which are as powerful as desktop computers which were built 2 years prior. A lot of companies are using these instead of laptops & they use less electric & are more portable. Also a lot of companies find it easier to offload newer computers which they often get paid for than to keep their computers as long as possible & then pay for them to be scrapped.

The Concorde Story

The book I read to research this post was Concorde: The Inside Story by Brian Trubshaw which is an excellent book which I borrowed from the library. Brian was Chief Test Pilot when they were developing Concorde. Many people looking back on the development of Concorde think of it as a massive British and French achievement. At the time it was being developed most people saw it as an expensive dinosaur. Concorde was a joint development between BAC & the french company Aerospatiale which also included money from there governments. At an important time in its development Harold Wilson won a close run election & had to look for ways to save money & both he & the Aviation Minister Lord Jenkins wanted to drop the project but there was no get out clause so they had to continue with it. One of the most expensive parts of the project was the nose cone which straightens when flying to make it streamline & drops down when on the ground so the pilot can see the ground. The French just wanted a larger perspex window but BAC thought the view was not good enough.  Lord King of British Airways was a key player in getting Concorde built he agreed to provide service contracts to the Concordes that were supplied to his company which were very expensive & also helped talk Air France into doing the same. Only 16 production Concordes were ever built & actually the ones run by Air France & British Airways have surprisingly made a profit. The Russians built a plane similiar to Concorde, the TU144 which terrified onlookers at one air show when there were sparks due to the exhaust touching the ground at take off. Soon afterwards 2 of them crashed & the second crash was never totally explained although one theory is a camera dropped into the nose cone jamming the controls. Anyway sadly they stopped production of it.

Twitter Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Twitter Marketing for Dummies by Kyle Lacy which is an excellent book which I borrowed from the library. You do hear about certain people on Twitter offering to sell you followers I've noticed some people who often have lots of followers offer to retweet you if you retweet them. Also if someone is after lots of followers the people are often inclined to follow you if you follow them. This book emphasizes quality & discourages the idea of trying to get loads of followers at any cost. If you are selling a product ideally you want followers you are interested in your product. A couple of marketing ideas are Dell the computer firm has exclusive offers on Twitter, & Ashton Kutcher the actor rented billboard space to promote his Twitter address. Both of them are very popular on twitter. If someone follows you, you should always follow unless they have no tweets or haven't tweeted in a long time. Either of those mean they aren't on Twitter very much & aren't going to see your tweets. You should do plenty of retweets it makes your followers feel appreciated & you should in particular look for tweets in the same industry as you. A very good Twitter app is Qwitter which tells you who has unfollowed you & helps you see if there is a pattern. To promote a product you need a blog, ideally a web site where they can buy the product, a facebook page, a linkedin page & a youtube page in addition to a twitter page. You need to integrate them but as well as advertising in your tweets you should also put useful links up & give relevant information.

Astronomy

The book I read to research this post was Astronomy for Dummies by Steven P Maran which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. Some astronomers especially ones who who work with abstruse physics & robotic telescopes might not have traditional knowledge of the constellations. There are far more amateur astronomers than professionals & a lot have made a useful contribution by things like discovering comets. It worth mentioning some guesthouses & hotels have an inhouse large telescope o r in some cases several & you can go on stargazing weekends. The largest moon in the solar system is one of Jupiters moons called Ganymede & that along with Titan the largest of Saturns moons are larger than Mercury. One of Jupiters moons called Lo is the only body in the solar system along with Earth to have active volcanoes. A probe called Cassini is mapping Jupiters moons. It was claimed there was a rock structure on Mars that resembled a human face & must be man made but scientists now know there's no resemblence. When there are meteor showers they're named after the closest constellation in the region of the sky where they occur with the suffix id added at the end of the word. There are too many stars for them to name all of them but what they do is use the greek alphabet & the brightest star in a constellation is named after that constellation & given the first letter alpha & then they go down in descending order of brightness to the last letter which is omega. Many observatories are located in remote places like Chile where there aren't too many streetlights which pollute the sky with their light & make stargazing difficult.

Building a Digital Forensics Laboratory

The book I read to research this post was Building a Digital Forensic Laboratory by Craig Valli et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. When you make a copy of a hard drive or RAM memory it has to be an exact copy. You need various hardware to acheive this you need the biggest hard drives you can get, the most throughput available & the hard drives should be hot swappable. You should photograph any digital devices & their connections & also the connectors should be labelled. Also when the digital device is reexamined in the laboratory it should be reconnected in the same way. The standard software they use in a laboratory is encase & sleuthkit for computers & mobiledit & paraban for mobile devices also you need various adaptors for mobile devices. It should be pointed if your laboratory gets discredited in one case your work will probably dry up so it is essential you follow the correct procedures. The building should be well away from fault lines, flood plains, tanks containing flammable substances basically anything that can destroy your building & evidence. It's worth pointing out that particularly in the USA there is a huge backlog of forensic evidence that is waiting to be processed & this is as good a time as any to start a digital forensic laboratory. Also digital forensics is still in its infancy & many cases at first glance don't seem to involve digital forensics but they are constantly finding new angles that do involve digital forensics. You should be aiming for a starting turnover of $3 million a year.

Ham Radio

The book I read to research this post was Ham Radio for Dummies by H Ward Silver which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Although I'm british this book covers the subject from an american perspective. There are organisations like Hammi Hams devoted to getting people with disabilities set up with radio ham stations when you think about it, it's ideal pastime for someone who is blind for example. In britain & america you must have a licence to be a radio ham. If you join a local club they will often have a base station that you can get experience using & often they will be responsible for officiating exams. A lot of people stick with using morse code because they can do a lower exam & the start up costs are quite low. The morse code transmitters used nowadays use separate keys for the dots & dashes signals which makes it easier. In america when you complete the standard exam for ham radio of which there are 35 questions & you must score at least 75% you get AX to add to your call sign in addition for people who want to get involved in emergency & relief relay work there's a higher exam consisting of 50 questions upon completion you get AE to add to add to your call sign. The first ham radio satellite was launched 2 years after sputnik & was about the size of a coffee jar they have come a long way since then & nowadays there are many radio ham satellites. When a radio ham contacts someone in a far flung place they exchange QSL cards which are similiar to postcards except they contain the hams call sign which they use as proof they have contacted someone.

Watermarking

The book I read to research this post was Transactions on Data Hiding & Multimedia Security by Yun Q Shi which is a very good book which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Watermarking & copy protection are almost interchangeable terms. Watermarking has many applications even data access. Even audio cds have watermarking next time you copy a cd look out for the message which says it's copyrighted. If you got taken to court for copying a cd that message which would be on the copied disc would be used to prove that you knew the disc shouldn't be copied. Many software have both watermarking & copy protection. When you copy the disc a similiar message to the one that appears for audio cds will appear. In addition you will probably have to set up an online account with a game service like steam which will check for the watermark. On a cdrom or dvdrom the information is in packets of 2 megabytes some games don't fill up all these packets with the result that if you try to copy it your computer gets confused. There is a way around this & that is by using a burnproof cd or dvd writer. Most cd, dvd & blu ray writers nowadays are burnproof. Watermarking can even be used with audio tracks where an algorithm puts a sound signal into a track. There's a relatively easy way of removing a watermark from a picture simply blur the part that contains the watermark. Sometimes you get specialist software that removes watermarks & these look at the result of the watermark & try to calculate the algorithm used. There's constantly a game of cat & mouse being played by the software houses & individuals trying to pirate their material pretty much like the world of viruses & computer security.