Archive for the ‘Forensic’ Category

Nutrition Information Tables

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

Numeracy teaching with a healthy eating message.

Maths tables

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

Maths tables produced using MS Excel

Blood Stain Analysis

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Some notes from a new blog

BTEC Award Criteria

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

Print from PowerPoint and blue-tak to a timeline for planning purposes

Binomial probabilities

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Chi-squared test viewed another way…

One use of the inclined plane

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

Blood stain measurement as a motivation for maths and error analysis.

Monday Whiteboard

Monday, May 15th, 2006

The photo above shows one of today’s whiteboards as imaged using my Olympus Camedia point and shoot – the images are 1600 by 1200 pixels. I resized the image above using Photoshop Elements with bi-cubic resampling. No other adjustments have been made, the flat image is typical of this camera. A quick e-mail to ScanR.com [...]

Forensic ICT new version

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

Just storing a draft in a convenient location

Simulated blood stains

Saturday, January 21st, 2006

Latest results on new experiments…

Measuring bloodstains with Photoshop

Saturday, November 26th, 2005

PhotoShop or similar image editor provides a way of measuring a scanned image accurately, but you need Pythagoras…

Intellectual property blog

Sunday, September 25th, 2005

Lawyer in Huddesfield uses Blogger to record case law

Proving you own software

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Small and medium businesses don’t have clear licence proof for software

RIPA 2000 prosecution

Friday, September 16th, 2005

How the mighty are fallen – Cliff Stanford founder of Demon Internet – receives suspended sentence for e-mail interception during argument with board members of Redbus

Second hand data?

Tuesday, September 13th, 2005

Just deleting files or even formatting a hard drive does not completely remove the data…. so who has your old hard drive or computer?

Zotob virus written for cash

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

New virus exploiting a vulnerability in Windows was commissioned for cash – dial M for Murder arrives in cyberspace

Zipf’s law?

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005

Broadband connectivity is shared amongst users – Fair Use policies need to cap bandwidth hogs

AOL Spammer canned for 15 Months

Monday, August 22nd, 2005

Jason Smathers who stole 90 million AoL e-mail addresses and sold them in alphabetical blocks to spammers is sent to prison for a year and a bit. He also has to pay restitution to AoL at the usual inflated level that US courts seem to impose.

Two security stories

Saturday, August 20th, 2005

e-mails sent by naive people can be tracked to the server using information in the header, and laptops used on insecure WiFi access points can still be traced using the MAC address of the network card or wireless card.

Every crowd has a silver lining

Thursday, July 21st, 2005

419 scams amazingly attract 20,000 people to part with real money.

Sven Jaschan gets suspended sentence

Saturday, July 9th, 2005

Sasser worm author gets suspended sentence from German court.

Xbox chipping and ELSPA

Monday, July 4th, 2005

The European Copyright Directive makes it an offence to alter games consoles so as to circumvent games copying controls. ELSPA has successfully prosecuted a case recently in the UK, and this raises issues about ‘change of use’ modification of platforms such as the xbox.

Recent History (Web security)

Thursday, June 9th, 2005

It all started in May of 2001. I began getting calls from companies I had tried selling security services to in the past but were never interested. Now they needed my help because something happened. It seemed like dozens of people had their websites defaced with the words: “fu*k USA Government, fu*k PoizonBOx.” It was [...]

Homework: explain Open Source

Wednesday, June 8th, 2005

“I dont really get all this open source malarkey. Do you know some where that spells it out S L O W L Y for us clueless folk!”

The homework was set by a student (who is not clueless at all by any means). Its my own fault for trying to interest people in using [...]

Map the Web

Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

The OPTE project provides views of the distribution of Internet connections and routes

Floppy discs in Open Access centres

Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

Download a handout for students on organising folders in My Computer. Saves all that stress with failing floppies.

SQR3 reading method

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

Survey! Question! Read! Recite! Review! is a reading framework that is suggested for University students.

As I find myself teaching a reading / writing based subject (Forensic ICT) to a group of sixth formers and some adults in the evening, I come up against problems with reading, summarising and writing. I have been ‘scaffolding’ complex readings [...]

Just Breathe (Zen of hacking?)

Saturday, May 14th, 2005

Forensic ICT lesson
Students searched for information about Adrian Lamo, the ‘homeless hacker’
Then we read page 3 and 4 of Marc Roger’s essay A New Hacker Taxonomy
Students were invited to analyse aspects of Lamo’s ‘career’ using Rogers’ roles
Disagreements! Arguments focussing on what the roles meant! Useful!
Lamo’s minimalist home page provides an example of embedded hypertext – [...]

Information access?

Wednesday, April 6th, 2005

The Business School hack has highlighted issues of definition around access to information. The (US based) article in The Register by Mark Rasch reports the facts as follows…

Some US business schools farm out processing of Web based applications to a third party Web company
Someone identified a security hole in the system used to process the [...]

The Teddy

Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

“Teddys would be with their user for their entire lives. They would change in shape and form to match the growing sophistication and interests of the person, but each time someone got a new model Teddy, the information from the earlier version would be transferred to the new. As a result, Teddy would always retain [...]

Being Analog(ue)

Monday, April 4th, 2005

Don Norman is the other half of Nielsen and Norman the usability consultants. He has provided Chapter 7 of his book The Invisible Computer as a Web reading. The title of the chapter is Being Analog – which we as humans are… You can also read other chapters on the MIT Press site and [...]

Motivation and timescale

Thursday, March 17th, 2005

Last few Drink or Die members are going through the courts – a non-profit cracking and warez ring
The BBC report on the UK conviction of Alex Bell and Steven Dowd now in 2005 after raids in 2001 relating to activity in the mid 90s has me thinking about the difference in timescales in IT and [...]

Lycos Fightback

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

Is the Lycos Fightback a distributed denial of service attack or not?

Either way, it looks like Lycos have suspended their attempt to hassle the spammers for now, perhaps for fear of retaliation against users.

The idea went as follows

Spammers send these daft e-mails to encourage you to visit their idiotic Web sites selling enhancement products you [...]

How SpamAssassin works

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

SpamAssassin is labelling some of my e-mail as spam. Often it gets it right, but sometimes it gets it wrong (e-mail from my own Web server forms is voted spam).

A rather old but useful article on how SpamAssassin does the sums gives basic information on the multiple rule scoring approach. The gory details are on [...]

Disinfecting a Windows PC

Saturday, November 13th, 2004

A useful article from The Register explaines what to do if your Windows PC gets infected by a virus. The article also mentions a number of free virus checkers and firewalls. I currently use AVG on the reconditioned Windows laptop – looks like time for Avast and Zone Alarm.

Online banking hiccup

Friday, November 5th, 2004

The BBC news story on the recent problems with the Cahoot online banking service also mentions an HCFB error where an e-mail was sent to 2,500 people in such a way that they could all see the addresses of the other recipients (CC rather than BCC).

What I find interesting was that this latter e-mail hiccup [...]

Sans Institute

Friday, October 29th, 2004

The SANS Institute has a good Web site where you can download articles about a wide range of topics – look for the Reading Room link from the front page. There is even a 13 page tutorial on using an Apple Mac laptop running Mac OS X as a forensic analysis station – the Mac [...]

Decode this…

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

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The Hacker Crackdown

Sunday, October 17th, 2004

Bruce Sterling’s 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is still available free on the Web. Sterling had the uncommonly neat idea of reserving the digital rights to his book and putting out a free copy. As Bruce says…

“The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown, and commercially the book has done well. On the other [...]