Monday, November 26, 2007

Exclusive Sneak Peek! Save $300 on ProofMark Unlimited™ Bundle


ProofSpace announced availability of our new ProofMark Unlimited bundle, at special friends-and-family pricing. Until December 31st, you get the entire ProofSpace product line: ProofMail, ProofDoc and ProofMark On Demand for only $200 for a one-year subscription, with unlimited ProofMarking and validations. That's $300 off the retail price! Each of the new products offers a unique way to use the patented ProofMark technology to protect your most important documents and emails. With ProofMark On Demand, you can ProofMark virtually any file over the web, even when you're away from your primary computer. With ProofDoc, you get your own personal ProofMark engine, right on your PC desktop or shared server. And ProofMail makes it incredibly easy to digitally seal incoming or outgoing email. Claim your $300 discount now.

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CERN Research Paper Urges "Checksums Everywhere"


Error levels in modern magnetic storage are very, very low. Unfortunately, personal hard drives are now very, very big--and that means you're virtually guaranteed to have multiple corrupted files on your disk, just by virtue of its sheer size. That according to a recent study out of CERN/IT, the IT group at the world's largest particle physics laboratory. According to the executive summary, "We have established that low level data corruptions exist and that they have several origins. The error rates are at the 10Exp-7 level, but with complicated patterns. To cope with the problem one has to implement a variety of measures on the IT part and also on the experiment side. Checksum mechanisms have to implemented and deployed everywhere."

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ProofSpace Announces E-Discovery Framework


The worlds of Information Security and e-Discovery are coming together in a structured framework to encourage discussion among legal, security and records management professionals. Last week ProofSpace introduced the Information Security e-Discovery Framework (ISEF), a unique framework for discussing the specific role of information security before, during and after e-Discovery. The objective--bridge the gap between legal and security stakeholders. The result--a more effective response and successful outcome to an e-Discovery process. Soon a discussion white paper will be released, explaining how the ISEF was created and how it can be used. This release will also initiate a comment and review period on the ISEF. View the announcement PDF here.

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The Next Big E-Discovery Challenge: Authenticity


Up until now, most of eDiscovery has been basic "blocking & tackling". That meant a lot of cataloging and indexing of data, records retention work, legal holds, destruction policy establishment, and deploying "vaulting" technologies. But the future costs and benefits of eDiscovery will likely pivot on something much different: how you handle authenticity challenges used as a negotiating tactic in a lawsuit.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Jacques Francoeur said...

In order for an organization to maximize the business value from its investment in the creation of corporate information (e.g., creation of IP or proprietary data) it must “unleash” its data to make it available to the right people at the right time anywhere.
A strategy to “lock” up its information in an attempt to preserve its authenticity is just a bad strategy against the best interest of the company. There are “content-level” protections (rights management for confidentiality and control and digital seals for authenticity) that enable the “free” movement of data while effectively mitigating the risks.

November 27, 2007 2:08 PM  

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Thursday, November 15, 2007

Publicity-shy Sedona "Working Group One" Meets in Hilton Head


Mark Reichenbach writes in his blog about the very quiet star chamber gathering last week at Hilton Head, South Carolina for the Sedona Conference Working Group One annual meeting. He writes, "Before you ask, there will be no blogging from Sedona, er, Hilton Head. It doesn't work that way." Earlier in his post, he reports "Analogous to the Paris Air Show and its relation to the spy community, Sedona's annual meeting brings together a special combination of the brightest and best in the e-discovery legal community... make no mistake, there will be new work product teed-up for discussion, and you should understand that even though the dialog 'stays in Sedona' the fruits of the group's collective effort don't." Past publications from the influential group can be found here.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Joel, I can appreciate the "link love" between blogs, and thank you for linking on my blog entry re: Sedona meeting in Hilton Head.
I am not sure if I'd ever say Sedona was "Publicity-shy" - more I'd say it's about encouraging dialogue, "unvarnished" if you will, in order to bring about the best dialogue will offer. "Star Chamber" is also not a quote that should be attributed to me.

Best regards and good luck with your blog. - On the Mark
http://www.metalincs.com/onthemark

November 20, 2007 4:58 AM  
Blogger joel said...

Thanks Mark, I made the correction re: Star Chamber.

Your blog has been a source of great information, I'm sure there will be much more "link loving" in the future.

November 20, 2007 3:27 PM  

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Cargoes Stolen with Counterfeit Electronic Release Documents


The International Transport Intermediaries Club (ITIC) warned members that misreleases of valuable container-ship cargos are becoming a major factor in claims by principals against their agents, and claimed that carelessness in dealing with telex releases has contributed to these losses. "Telex release" is the industry term for the release of cargo at one port when the original bill of lading has been surrendered at another. Today, despite its name, the telex release is almost always made by email. There have been multiple accounts of telex releases (emails) received by discharge port agents which have been manipulated to appear as though they have originated from the load port agent, and authorizing the release of cargoes and confirming that freight has been received, when it has not. ITIC is now recommending that agents verify the authenticity of messages before releasing cargo.

1 Comments:

Blogger Jacques Francoeur, ProofSpace said...

Hi Joel, What a story! Fraud will always exist simply - where the money is.

As a prudent and responsible organization required to exercise a minimum level of due care, you would think this kind of problem would be quickly mitigated given the mature content assurance technologies available to effectively solve the problem (i.e., Digital Signatures and Digital Seals of Authenticity).

Is it considered forgetful, careless or negligent not to deploy readily available technologies and best practices that are already well embodied in standards?

They are now fully aware of the problem.

Jacques

November 15, 2007 6:11 PM  

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Iron Mountain Buys e-Discovery Software Provider Stratify


Byte and Switch reported last week that Iron Mountain will shell out $158 million in cash to buy e-discovery vendor Stratify Inc. "Customers have been asking us for this... It's a white-hot market, by all accounts a billion-dollar market... We're seeing estimates between $4 billion and $12 billion in the next few years," said Iron Mountain president and COO Bob Brennan during last week's earnings conference call. Stratify's applications sift and search email, scanned documents, and electronic files for specific items, and they also map out relationships among threads and document groups, which attorneys can review when preparing for litigation. Iron Mountain will probably also attempt to leverage Stratify's Digital Repository to enhance its information retrieval services.

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Universal Data Retention Specification Demoed... without Data Integrity Safeguards?


Computerworld reported last week on a new "universal" data retention spec that "divorces data from the applications that created it". While the article doesn't really offer much detail on how the technology actually works, the really interesting omission is any mention of security or control mechanisms in the proposed protocol. Brings to mind an early large-scale XML implementation at a large financial services firm that a ProofSpace staffer worked on in a previous life, where nobody gave access control a moment's thought... and the systems ended up being wide open to anyone who got their hands on the data definitions.

Vendors such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Vignette Corp. demoed their software interfaces for the new specification that offers a universal way for users to store and access unchanging or fixed data regardless of the application that created it. The specification, eXtensible Access Method (XAM), was demonstrated at Storage Networking World last week for the first time. The specification was announced last spring and is expected to be presented to the American National Standards Institute for review as a standard early next year.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Jacques Francoeur said...

Finally a move in the right direction! At this time the “system is smart” and the “data is dumb.” When the data leaves the system or it is used by another application it loses much of its context or utility. Now if the “data was smart” and the “system was dumb,” data could travel across systems and applications and still preserve its value. A step in the right direction indeed. Will vendors embrace this direction remains to be seen.

November 27, 2007 2:17 PM  

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Chain-of-Custody... Or Chain-Saw?


"Exploring the issues surrounding chain of custody for electronic evidence may sound like a great cure for insomnia... But a string of recent judicial sanctions over chain of custody for electronic evidence has made the dry issue a hot topic: One that can make or break your case." In other words, unless you can prove chain-of-custody and data integrity for any electronic documents that your lawyers are trying to submit into evidence, you're going to find yourself up a legal creek without a paddle. That's what Christy Burke writes in this month's Law.com Legal Technology column. "...in the next two to four years, most or all states will be creating legislation with real teeth when it comes to keeping scrupulous security measures to secure digital evidence and ensure a proper chain of custody."

1 Comments:

Blogger Jacques Francoeur, ProofSpace said...

The role (or impact) of Information Security in the e-Discovery process seems to be a very unknown at this time. When I speak to CISOs about their role in e-Discovery their response ranges from “what,” “nothing at all” to “I do not even know who is my GC/LC.” That is, there seems to be no bridge between Legal and Security or understanding of how one can help (or hinder) the other.
Your article was helpful in identifying some of the roles of security during the discovery process. However, I would make the assertion that security considerations and measure should start way ahead of the notice of litigation. For example, at time of creation, time of corporate record declaration, and time of contract execution. In fact, no matter how secure you make a record from the time it is identified in the e-Discovery process, if falsification or manipulation occurred before this point you have just secured an unauthentic record giving it the “appearance” of integrity.
Necessary but insufficient!

November 27, 2007 2:45 PM  

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Storage on Trial


What is a good data-retrieval plan worth to a company caught up in litigation? For Morgan Stanley, $15 million. The average Fortune 500 company has over 150 lawsuits in active litigation at any given time. As document retrieval requests from the legal department start piling up, IT departments are just starting to realize how big and scary the eDiscovery monster really is, with retrieval eating up increasing amounts of IT time and budget.

In 2006, Morgan agreed to pay the hefty $15M fine to resolve an investigation by U.S. regulators into its failure to retain e-mail messages. E-mail played a central role in the (later overturned) $1.58 billion judgment in favor of Ronald Perelman in the case of MorganStanley v. Coleman. Perelman is a billionaire investor who said he was defrauded by the firm over the sale of a business. The judge, frustrated by Morgan Stanley’s inability to produce e-mails demanded by Perelman’s lawyers (the firm said backup tapes had been overwritten), took the unusual step of shifting the burden of proof to Morgan Stanley, so that the firm had to prove its innocence.

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