Continuation Part 2 - Discussion of the Amanda Knox case

[CDHost]

Looks like the BIOS data is there, perhaps someone with a bit more computer knowledge can see if this would be helpful without having to send the laptop to the manufacturer.

Well this is where we enter fantasy world because the BIOS wouldn't be helpful under any conditions for reading a drive. But if you thought you needed to use the original laptop, and you wanted to boot off the drive, yeah that would help. Of course both of these steps are essentially the opposite of what you would want to do for a forensic analysis where you want to hold the drive stable and strip the data using another system.

My read is that they were lying and just throwing around Technical (BS word) Talk. But they said they were quoting the recovery people so maybe they just didn't understand the issue.

But the main things is the court documents as submitted indicated the problem was that they needed information from Toshiba they couldn't get and we have now confirmed Toshiba makes that information freely and openly available.

 

[Chris C]

Well, in fairness it's quite a significant step from growing weed for personal use (with perhaps some minor dealing to friends) to dealing (or even using) cocaine. As has been discussed many times previously, cannabis/hashish is seen by many (most?) people as an acceptable recreational drug, on a level with tobacco and alcohol, whereas cocaine still has an unmistakeable stigma of definite illegality and potential serious physical/psychological harm attached to it.

My little brother who was 16 got caught growing 2 pot plants in the woods. He was convicted as an adult and sentenced to 10 years. However, since he was a minor the judge adjudicated the sentence and put him on probation for 10 years. One screw up, failed drug test or get in trouble with the law and he serves 10 years. Growing of pot plants is considered manufacturing. Though I don't know how strong the laws in Italy are for pot.

 

[CDHost]

My little brother who was 16 got caught growing 2 pot plants in the woods. He was convicted as an adult and sentenced to 10 years.

Chris I'm sorry for that. I have serious problems with treating people under about 25 as adults for sentencing purposes. I personally would like to see a gradual shift from juvenile sentences to adult sentences. I see no reason to not use the juvenile system for people 16 living at home.... And 10 years for pot plants is nuts.

 

[LondonJohn]

Well this is where we enter fantasy world because the BIOS wouldn't be helpful under any conditions for reading a drive. But if you thought you needed to use the original laptop, and you wanted to boot off the drive, yeah that would help. Of course both of these steps are essentially the opposite of what you would want to do for a forensic analysis where you want to hold the drive stable and strip the data using another system.

My read is that they were lying and just throwing around Technical (BS word) Talk. But they said they were quoting the recovery people so maybe they just didn't understand the issue.

But the main things is the court documents as submitted indicated the problem was that they needed information from Toshiba they couldn't get and we have now confirmed Toshiba makes that information freely and openly available.

A belated welcome, by the way. I noted the way you were disgustingly treated by some for having the sheer nerve(!) to want to write a blog post about this case (there are some people who spend large portions of their free time trawling the entire web for absolutely anything connected with or written about the case, which is undoubtedly how your initial post came to their attention...). But I've enjoyed reading your input, and look forward to debating the case with you over the coming months until Knox and Sollecito are acquitted

 

[LondonJohn]

BTW it appears that the law in Italy regarding cannabis possession and cultivation changes extremely regularly: it seems that almost every new government (and there are frequent changes of government in Italy owing to the existence of very fragile coalitions) changes the law one way or the other - depending on whether the current coalition is left-leaning or right-leaning. So who knows?

 

[RoseMontague]

Doesn't it say the dealer allegedly had sexual relations with Amanda?
Not that I think there'll be any confirmation of it - it would've been used by Mignini long ago if any such claim had been really ever made - either by the police or that anonymous dealer.
I guess "sex and coke" headline along with Amanda's photo sells newspapers.

This story has all the earmarks of having come in over the transom. There are no names, dates, times, judge, or much of anything to verify the truth or non truth of the story. Despite it originating locally with this paper, there is no byline indicating nobody at this paper even wants to take credit for this. There are no attempts to even get a quote or reaction from the prosecution or defense team or any effort made to show how the story was independently verified.

My opinion is that this is a pure smear job.

 

[LondonJohn]

Gotta love good government, Italian-stylee

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...Berlusconi-in-prostitution-investigation.html

 

[Dan O.]

Looks like the BIOS data is there, perhaps someone with a bit more computer knowledge can see if this would be helpful without having to send the laptop to the manufacturer.

I don't think BIOS was the issue with the disk from Amanda's laptop. The problem as I understand it is that the Toshiba drive keeps the map for how data is arranged on the disk in the memory on the controller card. Each drive is unique so when the postal techs swapped controller cards the drive was essentially scrambled.

The engineers at Toshiba may know enough about the algorithm that the drive uses to reconstruct the map that was on the old controller card and may have specialized controllers that allow them to analyze and reconstruct the data that is on the drive.


I am surprised that the defense wants to go to so much effort to recover Amanda's disk. I would think it more likely that Meredith's laptop would hold a clue to what happened in her room that night. The laptop display was open indicating that it was either left running for some task that did not require a display such as playing music. Or, Meredith was just opening it prior to being attacked. It also appeared that the laptop was unplugged, possibly to accommodate plugging in the lamp. There should have been some traces to indicate when the laptop last awoke from sleep and how long it had been running on battery. Some have suggested that the desk was jolted in the fight. Would an event from the sudden motion sensor in the disk be logged?

 

[RoseMontague]

Well this is where we enter fantasy world because the BIOS wouldn't be helpful under any conditions for reading a drive. But if you thought you needed to use the original laptop, and you wanted to boot off the drive, yeah that would help. Of course both of these steps are essentially the opposite of what you would want to do for a forensic analysis where you want to hold the drive stable and strip the data using another system.

My read is that they were lying and just throwing around Technical (BS word) Talk. But they said they were quoting the recovery people so maybe they just didn't understand the issue.

But the main things is the court documents as submitted indicated the problem was that they needed information from Toshiba they couldn't get and we have now confirmed Toshiba makes that information freely and openly available.

If I recall they sent it to three different companies to attempt recovery and if this was the only issue, I would think somebody at one of those companies would have tried it. Hopefully, Charlie will take a look at this shortly, if not I will send him a message on this.

 

[CDHost]

A belated welcome, by the way. I noted the way you were disgustingly treated by some for having the sheer nerve(!) to want to write a blog post about this case (there are some people who spend large portions of their free time trawling the entire web for absolutely anything connected with or written about the case, which is undoubtedly how your initial post came to their attention...). But I've enjoyed reading your input, and look forward to debating the case with you over the coming months until Knox and Sollecito are acquitted

Well thank you for the welcome. It is odd, h9A7wa9i1K does a pretty good job finding references. The rest of them make catty comments about those articles. I look forward to the debate as well. Evidentially you were providing support for my comments here, though I didn't know at the time since they were using a derogatory pseudonym for you and I didn't understand that. Thank you belatedly for that.

I look forward to the debates as well.

 

[RoseMontague]

I don't think BIOS was the issue with the disk from Amanda's laptop. The problem as I understand it is that the Toshiba drive keeps the map for how data is arranged on the disk in the memory on the controller card. Each drive is unique so when the postal techs swapped controller cards the drive was essentially scrambled.

The engineers at Toshiba may know enough about the algorithm that the drive uses to reconstruct the map that was on the old controller card and may have specialized controllers that allow them to analyze and reconstruct the data that is on the drive.


I am surprised that the defense wants to go to so much effort to recover Amanda's disk. I would think it more likely that Meredith's laptop would hold a clue to what happened in her room that night. The laptop display was open indicating that it was either left running for some task that did not require a display such as playing music. Or, Meredith was just opening it prior to being attacked. It also appeared that the laptop was unplugged, possibly to accommodate plugging in the lamp. There should have been some traces to indicate when the laptop last awoke from sleep and how long it had been running on battery. Some have suggested that the desk was jolted in the fight. Would an event from the sudden motion sensor in the disk be logged?

That's a possibility but I think she was attacked almost immediately when she came home. It is possible that Rudy handled the laptop. Was it in plain view on her desk at the time? Was it dusted for prints?

I always felt there was more interest in getting the information from Amanda's computer than just to develop more evidence of a friendship between Amanda and Meredith, however the defense could consider that of more importance than I am giving it.

 

[CDHost]

I don't think BIOS was the issue with the disk from Amanda's laptop. The problem as I understand it is that the Toshiba drive keeps the map for how data is arranged on the disk in the memory on the controller card. Each drive is unique so when the postal techs swapped controller cards the drive was essentially scrambled.

The engineers at Toshiba may know enough about the algorithm that the drive uses to reconstruct the map that was on the old controller card and may have specialized controllers that allow them to analyze and reconstruct the data that is on the drive.

Dan first off that kinda makes sense. Except that Toshiba doesn't make the drives the drives on the two damaged laptops were fuji and hitachi. And that "scrambling" / virtualization of sectors / tracks is completely standard basically every drive you've bought in the last 15 years does this. The only reason people weren't doing it early was that the math took older controller cards too much time. The algorithms are public and people publish their maps. This isn't a trade secret its mainly stuff having to do with the diameter of circles.

This is an article on a simple scheme that was used in the early 1990's but that gets the main ideas: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

Anyway, on today's drives it wouldn't be on the controller card it would be on the chipset on the drive itself. And even assuming you didn't have the mapping you just pull each sector off and then apply the algorithms to reconstruct. None of that is even complex for data recovery.

Geometry in the BIOS was something people had to worry about in the late 1980s. Assuming that none of them were using laptops that old, I'm thinking the company is just pushing the same technical gobblygook.

 

[RoseMontague]

So if Mr. Curatolo's testimony is discredited that would mean the testimony disputing Raffaele and Amanda's alibi the night of the murder is also discredited. Quintavalle is the one whose testimony disputed Raffaele and Amanda's account of the next morning, fitting into the prosecution theory that they went back for an early clean up. Much has been made of Massei's ignoring of the testimony by the police inspector that showed he did ask Quintavalle about Amanda and the confirmation of this by one of his employees there at the time. Yet Massei claims Quintavalle helped them "discover" that the inspector did not ask about Amanda after all. The report doesn't say how Quintavalle did this, maybe they could see no reason he would lie about it (except for the other two witnesses). I still think his comments about the TV interview were pretty much ignored by the court but I see it as significant.

From Raffaele's appeal:

Quintavalle only decided to make contact with the Prosecutor following considerable pressure exerted by the journalist Antioco Fois, a regular customer of his shop. These statements then allowed the witness to participate in television broadcasts on national networks. A fact that, during his testimony, Quintavalle sought to diminish. In fact, when asked the question “Don't you remember an interview you gave to TG2?” he replied, “TG2? TG2 came and filmed me secretly, I told them: “Look, I have nothing to say, nothing to declare”. They filmed me with the camera at the shop counter and I said to them that we should do nothing, they should go away” (transcript of the hearing 21.03.2009, p.111); while in this regard, the assistant Chiriboga affirmed that Quintavalle had reported having given this interview and, when asked by the President “So what did Quintavalle say to you about this interview?” the witness responded "He said: “I was interviewed”, we said: “But at what time?” He said he was interviewed after we went out to lunch” (transcript from the hearing of 26.06.2009, p.70).

Here is the screen-shot from the TV interview I posted a few months ago:

It could be that his hands are tied behind his back and he is taped to the chair but it sure looks like a voluntary interview to me. Frank quotes him as being upset that he was recognized as they shot him from behind as to not show his face. He said it was supposed to be disguised. Frank also indicates he closed up his shop during the interview. I wonder if he was compensated for that? In Frank's conversation with him he does not answer the money question.

Either his memory of a more recent and quite special event (TV interview) is bad or his truthfulness is bad. This is not a witness I would consider to be reliable, regardless.

ETA: The journalist listed in the first quote works for the same paper that published the Amanda cocaine article.

 

[RoseMontague]

I think you want to review the use of commas, and perhaps start a new thread about probability theory in another sub-forum.

Edited out my (non)humorous stuff. I prefer the Michel Foucault approach rather than the Léon Foucault approach but the pendulum swings between the two on this topic. I'll leave the math to you guys.

 

[christianahannah]

So if Mr. Curatolo's testimony is discredited that would mean the testimony disputing Raffaele and Amanda's alibi the night of the murder is also discredited. Quintavalle is the one whose testimony disputed Raffaele and Amanda's account of the next morning, fitting into the prosecution theory that they went back for an early clean up. Much has been made of Massei's ignoring of the testimony by the police inspector that showed he did ask Quintavalle about Amanda and the confirmation of this by one of his employees there at the time. Yet Massei claims Quintavalle helped them "discover" that the inspector did not ask about Amanda after all. The report doesn't say how Quintavalle did this, maybe they could see no reason he would lie about it (except for the other two witnesses). I still think his comments about the TV interview were pretty much ignored by the court but I see it as significant.

From Raffaele's appeal:



Here is the screen-shot from the TV interview I posted a few months ago:[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_383964d30f7f0b2bc8.jpg[/qimg]

It could be that his hands are tied behind his back and he is taped to the chair but it sure looks like a voluntary interview to me. Frank quotes him as being upset that he was recognized as they shot him from behind as to not show his face. He said it was supposed to be disguised. Frank also indicates he closed up his shop during the interview. I wonder if he was compensated for that? In Frank's conversation with him he does not answer the money question.

Either his memory of a more recent and quite special event (TV interview) is bad or his truthfulness is bad. This is not a witness I would consider to be reliable, regardless.

ETA: The journalist listed in the first quote works for the same paper that published the Amanda cocaine article.

Antioco Fois is also one of the authors of "Meredith – cronaca di un delitto" I think.

http://online.giornaledellumbria.it/portal/Iniziative/Meredithillibro/tabid/79/Default.aspx

 

[Dan O.]

Dan first off that kinda makes sense. Except that Toshiba doesn't make the drives the drives on the two damaged laptops were fuji and hitachi. And that "scrambling" / virtualization of sectors / tracks is completely standard basically every drive you've bought in the last 15 years does this. The only reason people weren't doing it early was that the math took older controller cards too much time. The algorithms are public and people publish their maps. This isn't a trade secret its mainly stuff having to do with the diameter of circles.

Raffaele's and Meredith's drives were Fujitsu and Hitachi. Amanda had a Toshiba drive in her Toshiba laptop. Somewhere I have a note on the model and serial number of that drive.

From the technical report of 11.2.2008 concerning the hard drive fiasco:

Following testing, the various interventions, it is then that the Toshiba disk belonging to the Toshiba brand laptop Mrs A. Knox was corrupted with obvious problems to the electronic board, which was inactive as the other two.​

This is an article on a simple scheme that was used in the early 1990's but that gets the main ideas: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing

Anyway, on today's drives it wouldn't be on the controller card it would be on the chipset on the drive itself. And even assuming you didn't have the mapping you just pull each sector off and then apply the algorithms to reconstruct. None of that is even complex for data recovery.

I got my data directly from a data recovery firm that happened to be giving a talk to my computer users group a couple of months ago. There are some drives that they can't handle yet if the controller gets fried. And yes, I'm talking about the board attached to the drive itself.

Geometry in the BIOS was something some people had to worry about in the late 1980s. Assuming that none of them were using laptops that old, I'm thinking the company is just pushing the same technical gobblygook.

I think we can agree that the BIOS drive geometry was not the issue. (It's never been an issue with me since I've only used drives with logical sector addressing since the early 80's)

 

[LiamG.]

What is the probability, that this has anything to do with the case at hand?

I`m just asking a general question about probability theory (there was some discussion about this topic here lately, wasn`t it?) to the "scientific-educated" people in this thread and not to you.
Do you want a cookie?

 

[Matthew Best]

I`m just asking a general question about probability theory (there was some discussion about this topic here lately, wasn`t it?) to the "scientific-educated" people in this thread and not to you.

As I suggested, if you want to ask a question about probability theory, you are probably better off asking it in the "Science, Mathematics, Medicine and Technology" sub-forum, where there are many people who will be able to help you.

 

[CDHost]

Raffaele's and Meredith's drives were Fujitsu and Hitachi. Amanda had a Toshiba drive in her Toshiba laptop. Somewhere I have a note on the model and serial number of that drive.

From the technical report of 11.2.2008 concerning the hard drive fiasco:

Following testing, the various interventions, it is then that the Toshiba disk belonging to the Toshiba brand laptop Mrs A. Knox was corrupted with obvious problems to the electronic board, which was inactive as the other two.​

If you get this. Which board are they talking about? The on-drive controller or the motherboard of the laptop?

I got my data directly from a data recovery firm that happened to be giving a talk to my computer users group a couple of months ago. There are some drives that they can't handle yet if the controller gets fried. And yes, I'm talking about the board attached to the drive itself.

OK I'm not in data recovery but you get my point that doesn't make much sense.

I think we can agree that the BIOS drive geometry was not the issue. (It's never been an issue with me since I've only used drives with logical sector addressing since the early 80's)

Exactly which means I'm not sure why they focused on the Toshiba BIOS the BIOS doesn't do anything anymore. Their report didn't make any sense.

 

[komponisto]

(there are some people who spend large portions of their free time trawling the entire web for absolutely anything connected with or written about the case, which is undoubtedly how your initial post came to their attention...).

Interestingly enough, Harry Rag never made it to Less Wrong. Nor did we see him in the reviews of a certain fanfiction.net story at a certain point in time.

A bit of a surprise, perhaps, but not one I'm inclined to complain about!