Does It Compute?

COFEE -- Remember Carnivore?

Microsoft has announced a new tool that lets law enforcement agencies examine the content of your computer in an automated fashion. Called “COFEE” (for “Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor”), it comes on a USB stick. You plug it into a PC, it runs its programs, and bingo, you’ve stolen data about the PC.

Exactly WHAT data is unclear, as is the question of what it does with encrypted or passworded files.  Microsoft says it is meant for use “by law enforcement only with proper legal authority,” but in Bush’s America where there is virtually no such thing as illegal wiretaps and eavesdropping, that’s a pretty meaningless statement.

So with this tool, the police can presumably peek into any passworded Microsoft Office files (although whether it can access PGP or other more secure formats is unclear) and see what you’ve been up to.

This is reminiscent of the ill-fated “Carnivore” program launched in 2000 by Clinton’s FBI which was designed to secretly scan millions of emails.  After a huge uproar, the program was dropped.

A psychiatrist friend of mine used to say that his favorite patients were the paranoids because “they have a good grasp of reality – they think the government is out to get them.”

Removing Unwanted Templates from PCLaw

PCLaw ships with a large number of bill templates. Many of these are for electronic billing in one LEDES format or another. Most firms do not use any of these and it is simply an annoyance to have to scroll through them all the time.  Fortunately, there is a simple lo-tech solution.

Using Windows explorer, go into the PCLaw program directory on the server, then to the Data | Statdata folder.  Create a new subfolder called “unused bill templates” or some such. If you then click on the “Type” column in the Statdata folder, it will sort your files by type. PCLaw bill templates all have an *.rbf extension. You can then select and move the *.rbf files that you are not using to the “unused” folder. You might want to be conservative and keep many of the basic templates - Detail, Sdetail, Generic, Interest, etc. in the event you need them. If you move one you need by mistake you can always move it back.

A similar strategy works for other templates that you may not use - cost recovery (*.crl format) for example, or custom tabs (*.ctl format).

The only drawback to this scheme is that it requires ongoing maintenance, since every time you update PCLaw to a new build, it will repopulate all the templates and you have to do it over again.

Firefox 3, Beta 5

I have been running Firefox 3, Beta 5 for several weeks now.  It seems to be flawless (although of course that depends on your specific configuration, etc. etc.)

My two favorite new features are:

1) The fact that it asks if you want to remember a login only AFTER you have successfully logged in. How many times have you told it to remember and then made a mistake in the login?  This is much nicer. However, the question appears in the menu area, not as a popup, so it takes a time or two to get used to it.

2) When you start to type a url, it not only fills it in, but gives you a plain language description of the site involved. So for example, if you start to go to weather.com, it will list all the different parts you have visited, such as “Old Lyme Weather Forecast and Conditions Connecticut (06371)” and other variations on the weather.com site.  Very slick.

The back and forward buttons are bigger (and different sizes), so they are slightly easier to distinguish. There are a number of similar minor improvements.

Based on a purely subjective reaction, it also seems a bit faster. 

The beta installs parallel to an existing Firefox installation , it does not overwrite it, but it does import all your settings and bookmarks, history, etc. So if you do experience issues, you can always go back to Firefox 2.

MicroHoo Not To Be

So Microsoft has “walked away” from the Yahoo deal. Assuming this is not just a very aggressive maneuver to force Yahoo stock down precipitously, this is a good thing.

A Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft would surely result in another “Acquire, Merge, Destroy” episode with the devastation of Yahoo. As one of Ballmer’s lieutenants reportedly observed, if Microsoft went ahead with a hostile takeover, the Yahoo employees “would burn the furniture.” For all the complaints about Google being the “next Microsoft,” Microsoft still has a profit margin of 80% or so on Windows, so it hardly needs to increase market share.

Speaking of which, one wonders what, if any, Thompson’s recent acquisition of Reuters (the company now to be known as Thompson Reuters) will have on Thompson West and its legal products such as Westlaw, Elite and Prolaw.

In firms with such radically different cultures, takeovers are iffy in the best of times and generally result in the destruction of the culture of the company taken over – look at Lexis Nexis which is in the process of utterly destroying the culture of both Time Matters and PCLaw” and subsuming them under the “traveling book salesmen” concept that seems to dominate LexisNexis..

"Arabic" (really Indian) Numbers and the Arab World

I just finished reading a book by Dick Teresi, “Lost Discoveries” which deals with scientific discoveries made outside the world of Western Europe – and well before any Europeans stumbled to them. Many, if not most of the great discoveries from the Renaissance through the 18th century had in fact been known long before by other cultures.

Three of the most interesting are: codification of the concept of zero in mathematics; the fact that the earth is round, and questions of time (the length of the year).

The concept of zero was codified in India about the 3rd Centruy BC (you can’t really say “discovered” about mathematics, since the underlying facts were always there). It was transmitted via Arab world around 800 AD. “Arabic” numbers in fact originate in India. Zero was strenuously resisted by Christian world - a future pope, then a priest, was accused of having intercourse with evil spirits for using a zero in calculation. And of course it is easy to poke fun at the fact that even today there is no “year 0" in the Christian calendar. The Mayans (ca. 300 AD), Babylonians (ca 700 BC) and Chinese (at least by about 1000 AD) all also had the concept of zero to one degree or another.

The Indians also knew that the world was round and that it revolved around the sun, as did various other people, and dated the age of the world at 4.3 billion years - very close to current estimate of 4.6 billion years. In fact, documents attesting to a heliocentric view of the universe may well have influenced Copernicus and Galileo.

It is well-known that the Mayan long calendar is more accurate than our current calendar. What is perhaps less known is that a calendar conceived by Omar Khayyam (a very good mathematician and a very bad poet) in the 11th century was similarly more accurate.

The bottom line is that many critical scientific concepts were conceptualized outside of Western Europe and well prior to the Greeks. They were transmitted from (in many cases) India to the Arab world, which often improved on them, then through Spain to Europe. The fact that these concepts may have been worked out in order to resolve practical and/or religious problems (how do you know the exact direction that points to Mecca?) is irrelevant.

Like any work of scientific popularizing, Teresi’s book is uneven and some of the details or examples may be wrong. But the simple weight of the evidence, taken as a whole, is overwhelming. Definitely a must read.

On Passwords – or !P@$$w0rd$

The most commonly used password is - you guessed it, “password.”  Followed closely by people’s initials, first name, etc.  You might as well use no password at all. When I go to a client and they don’t know the master password for certain applications, it generally does not take more than three or four tries to guess it.

Many people complain that using passwords is “too hard.”  But the solution is surprisingly easy. Pick a password that will be easy for you to remember and then do a certain number of substitutions for non-alpha-numeric characters.

For example, change a to @
change o to 0 (zero)
change s to $
change i or L to 1 (one)

In addition, you can preface or follow the password by a character such as tilde (~) or exclamation point (!), or put the year the person started work in parentheses (08).

All these will make a password that is easy to remember and extremely difficult to break or for anyone else to guess. Here’s some examples (in addition to the one in the title):

roadrage could become   ~R0@dr@ge
manicotti could become   !M@n1c0tt1
instantaccess could become (07)1N$t@nt@cce$$

Anyone looking at these will think “how can anybody remember that” but if you know the underlying word and the system, it is easy to remember.

Apple vs. Microsoft

There have been reports recently from various technology analysts that the Mac is gaining on Microsoft (love those Mac ads). But perhaps the surest indicator is the recent financial reports of the two companies.

Apple’s quarterly report for the first three months of this year reports a 51% increase in sales of Macs over the quarter a year ago, and revenue increased 54%. Apple increased its market share by over one percent – a significant increase in such a competitive market. iPod sales were flat.

Microsoft’s reported revenue on Vista (Windows) sales, on the other hand, was reported as “weak” and less than analysts’  expectations.

Now of course Apple is starting from much lower revenues, but still, such a dramatic difference is surely significant.

Abbyy FineReader 9.0 - OCR Gets Even Better

My review of Abbyy FineReader 9.0 has just been published as a TechnoFeature by Technolawyer. 

Abbyy 9.0 includes a number of new features, including the ability to recognize headers and footers correctly and the ability to OCR digital photographs of text. The Corporate edition also lets you set up a “watch” directory to OCR in the background.

But as with any OCR package the key is in basic text recognition, and here I have always found that Abbyy is overall superior to the market leader, OmniPage. The full review is available here on my web site.

Abraham Lincoln on Labor and Capital

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President. At bottom, he represented the interests of the small farmers - sandwiched in between big merchant capital in the North and the Slaveocracy of the South.  So on this historical May Day (first celebrated in Chicago after the Haymarket affair), it is appropriate to take note of the statement in his “State of the Union” address to congress in 1861: 

    “It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. ...
    “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration.”
        -- Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Message to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861

First Anniversary of "Does It Compute?"

April 29th marked the first anniversary of this blog: over 260 posts, pretty much 5 days a week.  The blog is driven by two major factors. 

First, my views on the software industry and various software programs. Thus you have rants about Vista; significant analysis of document management issues; trends such as LexisNexis’ “Acquire Merge Destroy” tactics towards the software it has gobbled up over the past several years - primarily Time Matters and PCLaw, but with other programs waiting in the wings (Juris?). These are the posts where I try to answer the title question of the blog:  Does It Compute?

Second, it is driven by my clients.  Over a third of my posts have been in the “tips & tricks” category, including 16 posts on document management issues; 18 on Time Matters, 23 on PCLaw, and 25 posts on Worldox.  Only 11 posts on Amicus Attorney because for most of the year it was not clear whether the new version would become a viable product or not – with the release of 2008 Premium, it seems to have remedied many of the failings of the previous version. These posts result from common questions I get asked all the time, or specific things that come up. A client asks me something and I think “the answer to that issue would make a good post.” Hopefully, these repositories can serve as a kind of advanced version of “Frequently Asked Questions,” since many of them are not just simple day to day issues.

I hope you have found it useful and will continue to do so. I welcome any questions and suggestions.

In the coming year I may blog a bit less often but will also try to contribute some longer and more systematic pieces.