The Positronikal Chronikal

Digital forensics is, without question, all about the data. Our tools, especially FOSS (Free or Open Source Software), get better all the time with regard to identifying and extracting artifacts. The premise itself is simple - human behavior during the course of computer interaction tends to result in new or changed artifacts. For the sake of discussion, artifacts that have been removed or otherwise deleted are changed artifacts. It's those new/changed artifacts that our tools dig up for us. As a simple example, a user downloads a file that did not exist on that system before the download will itself be an artifact, along with potential metadata about the file (i.e. MAC dates/times), data about the download (i.e. zone information), and the user account under which the download was carried out. There may likely be many more artifacts than these, but it's easy to see from this example that artifacts tend to result from human/computer interaction. Our tools are generally ver

Sounds like the title to a 60’s-era Hammer film, doesn’t it?  Reanimating this old blog may not be as scary to you as it is to me actually. It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here and the previous things I did post, well, they don’t appear to have been all that interesting. The Positronikal Chronikal started out as a tech blog covering all things tech that interested me – Web technologies, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), GNU/Linux, digital forensics, 3D graphics and animation, vector/raster graphics design, digital music creation, digital video editing, etc, etc. To be honest, blogging about things I liked instead of doing or even reading about those things turned out less appealing to me than it did to those for whom I might have been writing. Oh well… So by now, if you’re reading this, those old posts are gone (I hope) and the Positronikal Chronikal is heading in a more focused direction. Positronikal is still my catch-all project moniker, but these days I’m more na