The Positronikal Chronikal

...that the Chronikal was dead, alas, it lives! I've been busy lately sprucing up all the places where Positronikal might be found, to include a new home on the interwebs:  https://positronikal.github.io/ . I'm still in the process of populating projects, getting things moved around, and such as that. There will definitely be new digital forensic tools added there in the coming weeks, not the least of which will be installments that make up what I've named the Carnivore Digital Forensic System. I won't spend too much time on that now as I have an entire blog post in mind that will explain it all in detail. For the time being, I have two placeholder projects there that I'll move to my personal repository soon. I just needed something in place until I get some of these forensic tools up. I will say that I'm looking for sponsors to help promote these new tools. I'll be formally approaching those the entities that I have initially in mind with a prop...

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 mor...