Computer Forensics: An Essential Guide for Accountants, Lawyers and Managers

Michael Sheetz’s Computer Forensics is an accessible introduction into the hows and whys of gathering evidence in cyber crimes. Sheetz’s writing is easy to follow consisting of plain language and detailed information to explain this cyber forensics. His tone is casual, not patronizing. When he skips over a highly arcane area, he lets readers know and explains why.

At the end of each chapter, there are references to books which go into greater detail about evidence gathering, the law or technology. Given how wired our society is, sadly, it’s only a matter of time that one becomes a victim of cyber crime. This book will help you feel more empowered, even if like me, the police who’re investigating seemed to have taken a bribe and are ignoring their duties. (Sorry for the digression.)

I found the 2600 Hacker’s Quarterly website interesting and enjoyed reading about some of the important court cases. One investigation I thought was particularly shrewd involved the police or FBI putting a key log program on a suspect’s computer. Because the government couldn’t wire tap, the key log only recorded what the suspect did when the user was offline. They managed to get the evidence they needed and still use it in court because they’d been careful to follow all the rules.

Here are some software tools detectives have at their disposal:

• Win-Hex
• FTK
• Encase
• ProDiscover
• Hacker Defender

 

Democracy

This play by Michael Frayn delves into an episode in modern Germany’s history when East German spy Günter Guillaume infiltrated West Germany’s chancellor Willy Brandt. While serving a Communist spy, Guillaume was Brandt’s secretary with access to all correspondence and many discussions.

In parts I found the story hard to follow, but it is a good spy story, not as good as MI-5, but good.

 

From the Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky (1940) born Iosip Aleksandrovich Brodsky in Leningrad. He left school at 15, worked a series of odd jobs, and began writing poetry. In the 1960s, he taught himself Polish and English, and he began to translate poems from these languages into the Russian tongue. He even translated the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” into Russian. His irregular work record led to his arrest in 1964 for being a “social parasite,” and the fact that he was a Jew didn’t help him either. He was sent to a mental institution and then was sentenced to five years in an Arctic labor camp. His sentence was commuted after protests by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and poet Anna Akhmatova.

He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, and he moved to the States, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1975. In 1993, he co-founded the American Poetry and Literacy Project. His goal was to place poetry in public places like airports and supermarkets, to make poetry “as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us … or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves,” as he put it. Poetry, he said, “is the only insurance against the vulgarity of the human heart. Therefore it should be available to everyone in this country, and at a low cost.” One of the organization’s first projects was handing out free copies of the book Six American Poets in hospitals, hotels, and homeless shelters around the United States.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987, and in his acceptance speech he said:

“I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.”

 

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116

with some Austen film images.

 

Popular on Library Thing

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked unread by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi : a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses – twice once for my book club
13. Madame Bovary – twice
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales – twice, 2nd time for my book club
38. The Historian : a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – twice
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World – twice
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons
55. The Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – twice
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners – at least twice
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake : a novel
87. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas – half of it, I really hated it
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

 

Remembering Studs Terkel

Oral historian, radio host, and writer Studs Terkel is a hero of mine.

 

Poetry Corner

Ernie Kovac’s Percy Dovetonsils. I remember seeing this when I was young. Kovac’s is a comedian well worth remembering.

 

Tess D’Urbervilles

From the archives:

I was blown away by Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Written in the 19th century, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a powerful, moving novel that still holds readers’ attention from page one. It was our book club’s choice for September and October, but really isn’t that long, yet I’m glad I didn’t have to race through it in a month.

It’s the story of a young woman from a poor family who has hardship after hardship. No one cuts her a break. Yet she keeps on going. She doesn’t have any lofty aspirations, unlike her pathetic father who’s already a drinker, but becomes more useless once he hears that he’s descended, in more ways than one, from an aristocratic family.

I’d seen the movie in the 80’s and vaguely remembered some scenes and the tone of the story. I also remember Monty Python spearing Hardy quite often. Yet this is a well written book about a compelling character. I’m so glad I read it.

 

Begin Here

Jacques Barzun’s Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning is terrific. He examines education from grade school to grad school pointing out the ridiculous and offering better solutions and perspectives. Although it was first written in the 70s and updated in the 90s, its still current (sadly). It’s a fun, intelligent read and highly recommended for anyone with a serious interest in education.

 

Cool Evangelism

Well, maybe Donald Miller isn’t an evangelical Christian. He might not fit any mold. My friend Jennifer gave me a copy of Blue Like Jazz, Miller’s first book and I loved it so I bought In Search of God Knows What.

Again Miller muses over what it means to live a Christian life and wrestles with scripture applying it to American society. Here he focuses on our prediliction for comparison and status. He offers an interesting interpretation of Romeo and Juliet in light of Catholicism and Protestantism during Shakespeare’s day.

Miller is down-to-earth, perceptive and humorous.