Now, if you've been really bored, you may have poked around on your computer to find all of those wonderful files that Internet Explorer uses as its cache, and cookies that websites track your use by. This is can be wonderful for internet-related criminal investigations of suspected fraud or paedophilia. But not all of us are using Internet Explorer, and the alternatives are proving more of a problem.
Web browsers such as Firefox and Opera [...] use different structures, files and naming conventions for the data that investigators are after. And files are in a different location on the hard drive, which can cause trouble for examiners. Furthermore, forensics software may not support the Web browsers.
One specific challenge with Firefox and Opera is identifying which Web addresses have been entered manually as opposed to having been clicked on in a hyperlink, Glenn Lewis said Wednesday in a well-attended training session on alternative browsers at the annual High Tech Crime Investigation Association event [in Monterey, CA].
The distinction may be important in a case where a suspect claims he did not intend to visit a Web site, but accidentally clicked on a link or was sent to a site automatically. It is hard to make that argument if an address was physically typed into the Web browser.
Firefox and Opera store information on typed URLs in a different file than IE does, and the files are somewhat tough to decipher, Lewis said. He showed his students--mostly law enforcement agents and private investigators--how to do it.
Distribution of extreme pornography is illegal in the UK but this does not affect foreign websites, so new laws could ban possession of it in Britain. The Home Office and Scottish Executive are consulting on whether new laws are needed and what should be covered.
The aim is for a new offence of possessing violent and abusive pornography, which could be punishable by up to three years in prison, Home Officer Minister Paul Goggins told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Sidestepping the issues of defining "extreme" internet pornography and that UK ISPs may be forced to police the delivery of material to the user, could this and other contributing factors lead to the development of an almost totally secure browser, one that uses the kind of encryption used in industry and government to avoid any potential investigators having access to the history or other data so willingly given up by Internet Explorer?
Just curious: What defines '"extreme" pornography'? Extreme in my opinion may be "Oh my god, I'm going to hell for looking at this" bad for someone else, or vice-versa.
mat8drb
United Kingdom
October 2004
SEP 01, 2005 12:54 PM