forensics – FTI

At the Dawn of the Computer Age: Memories of the “Informational Revolution” Pioneers.

Do you remember your very first computer? Pretty much everyone does; most of the people in their mid-30s, early-40s can still remember these noisy big white boxes with huge square screens and clicking dial-up modems that took ages to download a plain-text news article or even a basic e-mail with no attachments. Well, it took almost 40 years for the technology to get to that point, and there are still alive today witnesses to how it all started in the basements of the world famous universities and colleges.

Joyce Wheeler is someone who saw it all in those early days. She also can still remember her very first computer, and one of the reasons for that is because it was one of the first computers anyone used.

Dr. Joyce Wheeler was among the pioneers of programming

It was EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), a “proto-computer” that was assembled and served scientists at the University of Cambridge back in 1949. Joyce Wheeler was a member of the scientists group who were working on their PhD degree under the supervision of famous astronomer Fred Hoyle. They were researching the reactions inside stars, in particular the star lifecycle stages and their length.

In order to perform the research, Joyce needed some powerful calculating equipment, since the inner workings of the nuclear furnace that keep stars shining is a very complicated problem to solve with use of a human brain, pencil and a piece of paper. Mathematics capable of describing this level of nuclear energy processes is pretty formidable: Joyce remembers that she had to solve a nasty set of differential equations that describe their behavior and composition.

A copy of Edsac is being built at the National Museum of Computing

Completing these calculations manually would almost certainly result in errors, inaccurate data and ultimately could – and probably would – affect the research outcomes. And here is where she met EDSAC – a machine built by Professor Maurice Wilkes, a technical device the size of several average size bedrooms, that was there to do the kind of calculations that Ms. Wheeler needed to be done to complete her advanced degree.

The first challenge for young astrophysics student was to learn the sophisticated language that machine could understand. She was quite familiar with the machine itself, since it was showcased to her prior the start of her degree course in 1954. Being keen to get her research done accurately, Joyce sat down with an instructions booklet and worked her way through dozens of the programming exercises from that pioneering programming manual. That little book was called WWG (after the names of the authors: Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler and Stanley Gill).

The foundations of programming were laid down by Edsac's creators — The foundations of programming were laid down by Edsac’s creators

While learning the programming, Joyce (whose family name was Blacker at that time) got talking to David Wheeler, since one of her programs was helping to ensure that EDSAC was working well. They eventually got to know each other, fell in love and married in 1957.

Joyce remembers that exciting time in detail: she could not stop wondering what the machine could do for her work. She was able to study the programming quite fast due to her strong mathematical background: she became very quickly able to master the syntax into which she had to translate the endless complex equations.

At certain point of time she realized that programming is very similar to Maths in the sense that one can’t do it for too long.

“I found I could not work at a certain programming job for more than a certain number of hours per day,” Joyce Wheeler remembers. “After that you would not make much progress.”

Research students like Joyce Wheeler had to use Edsac at night

Sometimes the solution to some programming problems that worried her from time to time would come into her mind while she was doing some other things outside of the computer lab: like doing the laundry or having lunch.

“Sometimes it’s better to leave something alone, to pause, and that’s very true of programming.”

When the programming bit was finally done, Joyce Wheeler was allocated a timeslot to run her programs on the EDSAC: it was Friday night. She remembers that this period was perfect for her: there were no lectures the next day she had to attend.

As an operator she was granted the right to run the EDSAC alone, but she had to make sure that everything she did was recorded. A quite common occurence for all the early computers (and EDSAC was no exception) was unexpected crashes. Joyce remembers that only occasionally she was lucky enough to keep machine running all night, and if it did crash, there was little she was allowed to do to try to fix it. Even the cleaners were not allowed to get near EDSAC.

Dr. Wheeler showed Joyce one procedure, that allowed the recalibration of the EDSAC’s two kilobyte memory, but if that did not help, Joyce had no other choice but to stop her work for the night. But despite the regular crashes, she made steady progress on finding out how long different stars would last before they collapsed.

“I got some estimates of a star’s age, how long it was going to last,” she said. “One of the nice things was that with programming you could repeat it. Iterate. You could not do that with a hand calculation. We could add in sample numbers on programs and it could easily check them. I could check my results on the machine very rapidly, which was very useful.”

Now, you should understand that “rapidly” back in the 1950’s meant “not more than 30 minutes”. This is the time that EDSAC required to run a program. After that the results were printed out for the researcher to analyze them. After that you had to re-program and wait another couple of days to run another round of complex calculations. Despite all these delays, Ms. Wheeler felt that she was a part of something that would change the world.

“We were doing work that could not done in any other way,” she said. And even though EDSAC was crude and painfully slow by modern standards, she saw that a revolution had begun.

We at FTI never fail to get inspired by pioneering scientists like Dr. Wheeler, with their single-minded dedication and commitment to innovating new solutions to existing problems, often in lonely circumstances and running against the tide of conventional thinking, driving them to expand the frontiers of discovery and learning in ways that eventually become implemented into normal life for the entire global population. Innovation, research and patience are some of the core values we cherish at FTI, and no-one demonstrated these better than Dr Joyce Wheeler.

Critical Role of Data Archiving for the Financial Institutions

Finance is an excessively regulated industry, with many moving parts and data that must be monitored and reported in order to stay protected and compliant with all regulations. One of the most important aspects of regulatory compliance for banks and financial organisations is record keeping and archiving electronic communication data. With the right tools and plans in place, archiving compliance does not have to be a daunting task.

Financial institutions generate a lot of data, which has to be archived by law.

Brokers, dealers, investment advisors, lending agents, futures and transfer agents, and businesses like mortgage companies, credit unions, banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, exchanges, commercial and retail banks, lenders and insurers, payday lenders, foreclosure relief services and debt collectors are all required to capture, monitor and archive business related communication data for review, audits, eDiscovery, litigation, and compliance.

But how do you become compliant? Let’s just jump right into the What, Why, and How of archiving compliance for banking and financial organisations.

Compliance with data archiving regulations is vital prevention of cyber crimes.

In short, a financial institution of any kind should be archiving all business related electronic communication data.

Email has been around long enough that just about everyone realizes the need to have a complete and easily accessible email archive. But you should really be archiving every bit of electronic communication data created by your organization. This includes social media, instant messaging, and content created on mobile devices.

The most obvious reason to archive emails and other business communication data is that your business is regulated and thus, mandated to do so.

Another thing that has to be archived - corporate e-mails — Another thing that has to be archived – corporate e-mails

Another reason why you should archive, that isn’t obvious at first, is data leakage. If you have proprietary data, customer account, transactional or confidential information, you are obligated to make sure that it isn’t shared, either purposefully or accidentally. The use of email, social media, instant messaging, and mobile devices increases the ease at which your employees could share this type of data. Couple that with the fact that the line between personal and business communication is blurred on corporate mobile devices. In addition to data leakage, you need to guard against insider trading, inappropriate financial advice, and stating personal beliefs about a financial investment or trade as fact. Having an archiving solution provides you with protection against these threats by giving you oversight. This oversight on employee communication data, coupled with an effective communication policy, will not only discourage bad behavior, but will encourage proper behavior according to established policy. Your employees will know that, according to your policy, everything they communicate is being stored and can be accessed for review.

As you can see, almost every commercial entity produces and accumulates large amounts of various data on a daily basis, so the “archival question” is becoming more actual nowadays and will become even more critical in the future. Data storage and archival solutions in the age of “informational revolution” we live in are required to provide not only the big data storage and rendering capacities, but also ensure the integrity and accessibility of data for years, decades and centuries.

art4 Falcon Technologies International LLC’s Research and Development team have created a solution that complies with the archival needs and requirements of the financial institutions and government entities. Our FalconMEDIA Century Archival CDs and DVDs with golden and platinum reflective layers showed outstanding results during the internal and third-party benchmarking tests: data stored on these professional archival discs stays accessible and integer for more than 500 years – timeframe that is enough to archive data for almost 7 future generations of the humanity.
Source: GWAVA

Recovering Old Files: Challenge or Lesson to Study?

Informational technology is developing so fast that data we stored only a few years ago is often stuck on old disks with very few drives that are able to read them. Computer forensics experts can uncover old files, sometimes solving crimes along the way.

Computer forensics specialist is investigating an old laptop

When new files relating to the South Yorkshire Police’s handling of the Hillsborough disaster emerged, plenty took the form of dog-eared notebooks and water-damaged folders. But in amongst the evidence handed over to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, there were also 167 floppy disks – containing hundreds of documents that were potentially critical to the investigation.

Paper is a reasonably useful medium; if it gets a bit damp or dirty you can still read the marks that have been made on it. But the same can’t be said for magnetic storage. The exhibits manager for the inquiry, David Wolstencroft, and his team had to purchase an ageing computer in order to read the 5.25-inch floppies – disks much bigger than the 3.5-inch ones most of us remember using on our PCs before they died out, and a medium already well on the way to obsolescence at the time of the 1989 disaster. “We got them all read,” he told the BBC when the analysis was just getting under way in 2013, “and they’ve come back on two small disks [DVDs] that aren’t even full. It’s unbelievable the way technology has changed.”

Old floppy discs may still be a source of important evidences of the old cases

The process of transferring data from old media such as floppy disks to more modern, readable formats might sound relatively easy, but the transient nature of modern technology can make it hugely problematic. Tracking down and purchasing a computer from the era of shoulder pads and Crocodile Dundee would seem like a promising initial step, but the subsequent journey is uncertain.

“If you boot up an old machine,” says Tony Dearsley, Principal Consultant at digital forensics firm Kroll Ontrack, “you have no idea what’s going to happen. It will have been sitting in a cupboard for 15 or 20 years. You’re going to have component failure, capacitors are going to die. Ideally you’d try to avoid doing that altogether.”

Attempting to boot up and old PC very often end up at this point

Our increasing reliance on technology and the related increase in the digital information we all generate has fuelled a massive rise in the number of firms offering digital forensics services. But when old cases are reopened and dusty technology resurfaces, experts face multiple challenges.

Floppy disks, from the 8-inch to the 5.25-inch to the 3.5-inch, become less willing to yield up their contents with every passing day. Even hard disks, which theoretically have some measure of protection from the atmosphere, still experience decay.

Data storage mediums have changed so many times during the last 50 years, that it seems like we are still looking for a perfect way to store the huge volumes of information we generate on a daily basis. And as years go by, the compatibility of data carriers and readers becomes a bigger and bigger problem. If only data archiving would be somehow standardized, then we would we most likely not face such challenges anymore?

Many kinds of sensitive data have to be stored and preserved in a way that can be easily accessed after years, decades or even centuries. As has been touched upon already, paper is a good medium of storage, but it has a number of disadvantages: beginning from large physical volume per unit of information and ending with poor level of environmental influence resistance.

Century Archival DVDs are able to secure data for hundreds of years

Data storage experts agree that as of today, there is no better alternative for optical media in data archiving. Professional archival grade DVDs and CDs with gold and platinum layers are able to secure data for centuries, fact proven by a number of professional tests under severe environmental conditions.

Falcon Technologies International has a specially designed product line called Century Archival, that is a perfect solution for a long term data storage. It is not only a cost-efficient solution, but also a guarantee of secure and lasting data storage.