Cryptosmith

If it’s public information on paper, is the electronic version also a public record?

As a techie, I tend to think so. The electronic version carries more information, is easier to work with, and is sometimes easier to authenticate.

The city of Phoenix, AZ, recently argued the opposite in court, and ultimately lost. Someone was suing the city and demanded some public records. The city provided paper copies, some of which appeared to be backdated. The plaintiff demanded the electronic copies so he could examine the metadata. The city refused, saying that the metadata was not public record. Two courts agreed, but the Arizona Supreme Court disagreed. So a court is on record saying that, if the document is a public record, the electronic form is also a public record.

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Back in the 1970s when many of us were struggling to free ourselves from mainframes, the mantra in the computing world was “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.” No doubt Bill Gates was inspired by this to build his own empire. Today, people unblushingly swap “IBM” for “Microsoft” in that mantra.

Since converting back to the Macintosh I’ve been learning a lot about Microsoft-centric software. Several programs that ran on both systems have essentially withered, especially since the conversion to OS X. I’m most directly affected by Microsoft-centric teams at Intuit and at Adobe. Continue Reading »

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I spent several hours trying to convert to Quicken on the Mac. Then I tried using some standard functions. Let me assure you, it’s not worth anyone else’s time and bother. I’m pretty committed to using my Mac when I can, as opposed to regularly switching to the PC to get the ‘real’ work done. I read other horror stories about Quicken on the Mac on the Internet, but really thought it couldn’t be so bad. I was wrong.

For the record, the latest version of Quicken for the Mac is the ‘2007′ edition, with some downloaded – and manually applied – updates. There are reports of a new program from Intuit to be called “Quicken Financial Life for Mac.” But according to fine print on the web site, this is actually “Quicken Lite.” So it would seem that Mac users are screwed as far as Quicken goes for the foreseeable future. Continue Reading »

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A recent Handler’s Log on the SANS Internet Storm Center spoke of the recent demise of an early blog site called “Journalspace.com.” Evidently their disaster recovery strategy consisted of maintaining a mirrored RAID system.

I’ve written quite a bit about how mirrored RAID is a fundamental part of my disaster recovery strategy. However, the Journalspace people apparently skipped an essential step: they relied solely on their on-line data and didn’t keep an off-line (preferably off-site) backup.

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