Archive for August, 2014

All About Data Loss

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It isn’t rare to see someone come into our computer shop who is worried about the data on their computer. There are many things that can go wrong with the part of the computer that stores your personal files, some of which we can fix, and some of which require special facilities that we don’t have. If your computer stopped working and you’re worried about your data, the situations I’ll describe here should give you a better idea of what you can expect to happen. They’re listed in order from highest to lowest chance of recovery.

  • Corrupt MBR

    One common issue is the MBR, or Master Boot Record on the hard drive being corrupt. The MBR is located on the first few megabytes of the drive, and contains information as to where each file on the hard drive is located. If the location information in the MBR differs from the actual location of the file on the drive, the computer won’t be able to find the file. This will often result in the computer not booting. The technicians at South City Computer can look through the actual data on the drive, and rebuild the MBR based upon it, resulting in a full recovery and a usable drive.

  • Unable to mount drive

    When the drive won’t mount, it means that there are too many bad sectors on the drive for the computer to open and use the file system. It is impossible to boot a computer when the drive won’t mount, and it also means that recovering files from the drive will involve working with raw data. In most cases, our software technicians can use advanced tools to pull the raw data from the drive and form an image, a virtual drive stored as a file within a different drive. We use advanced algotrithms to rebuild the corrupt sectors amd patch them into the image. Then, the image can be mounted and the files can be extracted.

  • Too many input/output errors

    This situation is the same one as above, except that the drive has so many corrupt sectors that we can’t rebuild it. In this case, we would use a technique called file carving. To carve files, we look through the raw data for signatures that indicate the data of a specific file. Each file type has it’s own set of signatures. Since we are wokign with raw data, we can recover the content of the files, but not their names or locations.

  • Mecahnical Problem

    This situation occurs when the drive has mechanical damage to the point that the computer won’t even recognise it as a drive anymore. To remedy such a situation requires taking the drive apart and moving the platters onto a different unit. We do not attempt this type of repair because we don’t have the necessary facilities. We can advise you on your situation and refer you to a company that does, though.

Missouri passes data privacy amendment

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MO digital privacy amendment
On the August 5th, 2014 primary election the people of Missouri voted to protect their digital data privacy from unreasonable searches and seizures with almost 75% of the votes. The original constitutional amendment in Article 1 Section 15 “Unreasonable search and seizure prohibited–contents and basis of warrants.” was enacted in 1875, and became outdated with the dawn of the computing and digital information age.

The original amendment states:

“That the people shall be secure in their persons, papers, homes and effects, from unreasonable searches and seizures; and no warrant to search any place, or seize any person or thing, shall issue without describing the place to be searched, or the person or thing to be seized, as nearly as may be; nor without probable cause, supported by written oath or affirmation.”

Not surprisingly there was no mention of electronic data privacy in this amendment, and left digital privacy up in the air until now.

Amendment 9 in the primary election adds the words “electronic communications and data” to this amendment to try cover electronics such as computers, smart phones, internet browsing history, and other digital devices. In theory this means that law enforcement would be required to get a warrant in order to confiscate and search your computer, hard drives, smartphone, Internet access history, and other digital devices.

This was the wording on the ballet:

“Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended so that the people shall be secure in their electronic communications and data from unreasonable searches and seizures as they are now likewise secure in their persons, homes, papers and effects?”

And this is what the actual constitutional amendment will be updated to:

“Section 15. That the people shall be secure in their persons, papers, homes [and], effects, and electronic communications and data, from unreasonable searches and seizures, and no warrent to search any place or seize any person or thing, or access electronic data or communication, shall issue without describing the place to be searched, or the person or thing to be seized, or the data or communication to be accessed, as nearly as may be; no without probable cause, supported by a written oath or affirmation.”

While their are already protections for digital privacy enacted by the Federal government, on the state level there had been no mention of digital privacy until now.

In reality what this actually means will have to be determined by the Missouri courts system, however in theory it may give those seeking protections from unreasonable search and seizure of their smart phones and laptops during an interaction with law enforcement more protection.

St. Louis Elections Website Hacked?

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stlelections-hacked
Just days before the August 5, 2014 primary election, the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners website (stlelections.com) may be hacked according to Google. When clicking on the link, the website appears to no longer be resolving, and shows only a blank white screen. This certainly makes it challenging for St. Louis City voters to “study up” as Mayor Francis Slay urged voters to do in a tweet he made on Saturday before the election.

While this is most likely an isolated incident on the stlelections.com web server, you should probably avoid visiting website until it appears to be fixed as it could also infect your computer with spamware, ransomware, malware, viruses, or trojans.

Voters can review ballot issues on the Missouri Secretary of State website: http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/2014ballot/, however information on local St. Louis City election candidates and issues are a little harder to find at this time.

Facebook Down

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Facebook Down Message
Today, around 11:00am CST tens of thousands of tweets flooded Twitter from London to St. Louis posting the resounding message, #FacebookDown. Twitter users made light of the situation by making snarky tweets such as “You are only on Twitter because #FacebookDown”. Or another tweet urged people to go do something else: “Since #FacebookDown go outside and play.”

The Facebook outage appeared to have only been temporary for less than 30 minutes. The Facebook website was back up by noon CST on August 1, 2014. However the hiccup to service was wide felt across the Internet.

A quick check during the outage using isup.me confimed the situation earlier today.
Screenshot - 08012014 - 11:29:36 AM

The Facebook outage only appeared to have affected the browser version of the application, the mobile interface seemed to function normally during the Facebook outage.

There has been no official statement offered from the companie’s Twitter @facebook for why there was a temporary outage to service, howerver Mashable reports that a representative from Facebook issued the following statement: “Earlier this morning, some people had trouble accessing Facebook for a short time. We quickly investigated and are currently restoring service for everyone. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

The companies stock NASDAQ: FB did not appear to be greatly affected only dropping about $1 to $71.58 per share during the service outage.

fb-down

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