I'm confused by why JWZ says that the Mork database code has anything to do with killing people. It is not presented as a product to be used for the collection of forensic evidence. Every user agrees to terms of use that suggest it is not a mission-critical piece of software to be used for sending a manned mission to mars or saving the location of your buried ingots of gold.
Relying on its data to convict someone of a capital offense says more about the justice system then it does about the software, and if an alleged killer should go free because of its unreliability, that says more about the inability of the police to gather sound evidence than about the inability of its programmers to build software for the unstated requirement that it catch criminals.
>I'm confused by why JWZ says that the Mork database code has anything to do with killing people.
Here's the progression of thoughts.
1) Messed up database format is difficult to decipher.
2) Difficulty in deciphering the format, leads a forensic analyst to mistakenly conclude that the site was visited 84 times instead of just once.
3) Assume that Jury reaches conclusion that Casey Anthony killed her daughter using chloroform. Thus the choice is then whether it was simple manslaughter and she gets a few years in prison, or it was premeditated murder, and thus eligible for the death penalty.
4) Since the suspect visited the site 84 times, this helps lead to the jury concluding that the killing was premeditated murder, and thus Casey Anthony should be put to death.
5) Thus, as the result of a bad database format, someone was put to death instead of just serving a few years in jail.
Also, computer forensics is ALL ABOUT dealing with fucked up data in bizarre formats (if the design of the format doesn't make it bizarre, the baffling habits of its users and provenance of the data will).
Welcome to my job..... and this is only the tip of the iceberg. Mork is one of many painful "things" that no one seems to be able to produce a decent forensic tool for :S
Looking at that format, no wonder JWZ had trouble getting a list of recently visited URLs.
Quite a contrast with the present-day. A few months ago, I wanted to extract just that information, and despite not knowing a lick of SQL, I still managed to write a little script which would extract 'all URLs visited in the last month': http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#local-caching
[+] [-] raganwald|14 years ago|reply
Relying on its data to convict someone of a capital offense says more about the justice system then it does about the software, and if an alleged killer should go free because of its unreliability, that says more about the inability of the police to gather sound evidence than about the inability of its programmers to build software for the unstated requirement that it catch criminals.
[+] [-] allwein|14 years ago|reply
Here's the progression of thoughts.
1) Messed up database format is difficult to decipher.
2) Difficulty in deciphering the format, leads a forensic analyst to mistakenly conclude that the site was visited 84 times instead of just once.
3) Assume that Jury reaches conclusion that Casey Anthony killed her daughter using chloroform. Thus the choice is then whether it was simple manslaughter and she gets a few years in prison, or it was premeditated murder, and thus eligible for the death penalty.
4) Since the suspect visited the site 84 times, this helps lead to the jury concluding that the killing was premeditated murder, and thus Casey Anthony should be put to death.
5) Thus, as the result of a bad database format, someone was put to death instead of just serving a few years in jail.
[+] [-] brown9-2|14 years ago|reply
I don't understand what you mean by this.
Isn't "data" just another form of evidence, whether it's your browser's history file or bank account records or cell phone history records?
Why is one type of data less worthy than others?
[+] [-] contextfree|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parfe|14 years ago|reply
Looks like David McCusker is the original author and it was only supposed to be a temporary solution that lasted until 2009.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050315212725/http://erys.org/re... explains mork being an abstraction layer on top of MDB.
Also http://web.archive.org/web/20050324235032/http://erys.org/re... for some general info linked from the mozilla.org link.
[+] [-] ErrantX|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
Quite a contrast with the present-day. A few months ago, I wanted to extract just that information, and despite not knowing a lick of SQL, I still managed to write a little script which would extract 'all URLs visited in the last month': http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#local-caching