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Amazon bests Microsoft, all other contenders in cloud storage test | ars technica

December 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service has outperformed Microsoft’s Windows Azure Storage and all other major providers in an extensive study testing the feasibility of businesses using cloud services for primary storage, data protection, and disaster recovery.

Nasuni, which sells data protection services that work across any type of cloud storage, says it has been testing the 16 largest cloud storage providers (CSPs) since April 2009 to determine the best services for its customers. Ultimately, only six of the 16 providers passed Nasuni’s testing—in addition to Amazon and Microsoft, the other winners were Nirvanix, Rackspace, AT&T Synaptic, and Peer1 Hosting. Both AT&T and Peer1 use EMC’s Atmos platform on the back end, although EMC itself discontinued its own public cloud based on Atmos.

While these six are, apparently, ready for real-world use, Nasuni politely declined to say which ten services failed its test, so we can’t warn you away from those vendors. But Nasuni does say the difference between the ones who passed the tests and those that didn’t is in some cases quite large. When Nasuni tested the providers for scalability by continuously writing small files of 1KB for weeks on end to determine error rates and performance, two of the eight providers that made it through this stage of testing failed, and others couldn’t complete the test.

“Without proper testing, it is impossible to differentiate between an industrial-strength CSP and a lesser operation,” Nasuni said. “In fact, some providers have asked Nasuni to cease testing at this stage because they said it was negatively impacting their customers, which is a truly frightening statement. True cloud storage should be able to accommodate billions of files without any visible strain. Those CSPs that faced performance issues under Nasuni’s test are simply not equipped to deliver an appropriate level of service to customers.”

via Amazon bests Microsoft, all other contenders in cloud storage test.

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E-Discovery: What Businesses Should Know | The Small Business Authority

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Remember the Enron email scandal? As part of a federal investigation into the fraudulent activities going on at Enron in the early part of this century, hundreds of emails were released to the court and eventually to the public. ABC News1 reported that many of these emails “could prove to be embarrassing,” not only for Enron but also for employees whose names were attached to the personal emails they’d sent that were now being revealed to the world. The gathering of these emails was an example of e-discovery, a trend that companies and individuals will continue to face as part of the digital era.

What is E-Discovery?

E-discovery is a broad term used to describe any situation in which electronic data, such as email or internet postings, are sought in a criminal or civil case. The discovery process allows plaintiffs and defendants to exchange information during pretrial preparation, and the court will actually compel information to be turned over if it’s relevant or “probative” to the case.

In days past, discovery was limited to phone records, paper documents, and the like, since those were all that existed. Records were available only of the things people had chosen to write down, and the extensive amounts of paperwork turned over in cases were cumbersome to go through.

Today, however, e-discovery is changing the game. According to figures compiled in a recent Law.com2 article, Twitter users send more than 200 million status updates every day, and people on the internet send 13,800,000 messages every single hour. All these tweets and emails and instant messages and Facebook posts and chats that are flying around cyberspace create a written record of things that might otherwise have been discussed over the phone or in person. Because the records are digital, all of the data and information are stored somewhere and rarely eliminated, no matter how hard you try to get rid of the data. Further, the digital format makes it easy to sort through data quickly to find relevant information.

These online communications are generally not privileged except in certain unusual and limited circumstances. This means that all of these records can be accessed as part of e-discovery, and they can have a significant impact on litigation by providing evidence of things that otherwise might have been unprovable. For example, according to USA Today,3 the twins who sued Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that evidence existed in instant messages that would prove that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from their own website plan. Although a judge dismissed the twins’ suits, it’s easy to imagine a case in which a message sent and forgotten many years ago could be uncovered and used in litigation.

via E-Discovery: What Businesses Should Know | The Small Business Authority | Small Business Services and Small Business Solutions.

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Balancing Automation And Hands-On Review In E-Discovery – Forbes

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In litigation and government investigations, lawyers have a duty to disclose all documents related to the dispute, no matter where that data lives: whether it’s on a laptop, on a smartphone, across multiple servers, or in a cloud-based database. Therefore, this information explosion has transformed what was once a challenge akin to walking up a steep hill into hiking Mount Everest. For example, in a recent lawsuit it filed, the U.S. government buried the defendants’ lawyers in over 250 terabytes of data (enough paper to store in the Library of Congress about 20 times over).

A CIO or general counsel tasked with handling the document requests during a lawsuit understands how unwieldy it is to provide years of company data, consisting of large amounts of information, during the discovery process without the right resources. That’s where automation has stepped in. The latest breakthrough has come to be known as “predictive tagging,” which essentially teaches the e-discovery software what types of documents are relevant to each case. Complex algorithms help the program learn to “review documents,” marking those documents for responsiveness or privilege.

Will this technology effectively replace all human document reviewers? The short answer is simply no. Despite all the technological advances in e-discovery and document review, without human guidance, machines cannot handle the complex decision making that ultimately determines whether a document is responsive. Lawyers must first manually go through a sample set of documents and teach the program what is relevant and what is not. Once the software has learned what to look for, legal teams can benefit from the software’s quick prioritization of data. But ultimately, it is still the lawyer’s job to confirm the results.

Predictive tagging is particularly indicative of how automation and human comprehension must collaborate to efficiently complete the task of reviewing data. Essentially, they need each other. Because humans have to teach software how to “understand” and therefore treat certain data, people are an indispensable part of the process. Yet, without the accurate culling that software performs, the amount of data would be too large for humans to manage and review alone. As an added benefit, some software and e-discovery providers can monitor the speed, progress, and accuracy of the human reviewers to determine their efficiency and competency.

That’s where automation reaches the boundary of practicality. Indeed, software is brutally efficient; it doesn’t fatigue, and it never makes a mistake. Then again, it cannot stray off a given course. Therefore, human intuition, awareness of nuances and ingenuity will always need to play a part in the process.

via Balancing Automation And Hands-On Review In E-Discovery – Forbes.

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FBI rejects FOIA request for Carrier IQ info – Computerworld

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The FBI has denied a request for the release of information regarding its use of Carrier IQ’s software, saying that releasing the information could interfere with ongoing law enforcement operations.

The response does not make it clear whether the agency is using Carrier IQ for investigative purposes, or whether the documents it has, are related to an investigation of the controversial software.

The request under the Freedom of Information Act was filed Dec. 1 by Michael Morisy, co-founder of MuckRock, a website that helps people file FOIA requests with the government. Morisy asked the FBI for any manuals, documents or other written material it might have related to the FBI’s use of data gathered by Carrier IQ.

In response, David Hardy, the section manager of the FBI’s Records Management Group said the FBI has in its possession “responsive documents” pertaining to Carrier IQ. However, Hardy said the FBI would not release the documents as requested because doing so would compromise ongoing investigations.

via FBI rejects FOIA request for Carrier IQ info – Computerworld.

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When Computer Misuse Becomes a Crime | The Recorder

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A few years ago, Bay Area federal prosecutors took up a white-collar case that wasn’t particularly sexy, indicting a handful of employees of an executive recruiting firm who had tapped an internal database to get information to start a competing business. The U.S. attorney’s office quickly cut deals with two of the lower-level employees before indicting its main target, David Nosal, an executive at Korn/Ferry International, charging him and a woman named Becky Christian with a slew of crimes, including trade secret theft.

And they invoked the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the 1980s anti-hacking statute.

What started as a routine prosecution stemming from an employment dispute has turned into a heated battle — with national implications — over civil liberties in the digital age. At oral argument on Thursday, an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals will sort out whether the CFAA allows for the federal prosecution of employees who so much as check a ballgame score on a work computer or fib on Facebook in violation of a terms of use agreement.

“Quite frankly, the facts of the case aren’t terribly important,” said Dennis Riordan, one of Nosal’s appellate attorneys. “It’s really a huge, pure question of law about what the statute means and a question of law that really goes into an enormous difference in scope.”

As Riordan frames it in his brief, the question is whether an employee breaks federal law when he is authorized to use a company computer but does so in a manner that violates corporate policy. The case has garnered the attention of a huge employer in Silicon Valley, Oracle Corp., which has weighed in on the side of the government. Advocating a more limited reach of the act is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“In one fell swoop, the panel opinion creates a new theory of criminal liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” wrote EFF senior staff attorney Marcia Hofmann and staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury in an amicus curiae brief, “that gives employers the discretion to define what is and is not a federal crime.”

via When Computer Misuse Becomes a Crime.

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Legal Outsourcing: Is the Bloom Already off the Rose? – Law Blog – WSJ

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Things are tough all over in the legal world these days, with even those pesky offshore outsourcing outfits likely to see a profitability squeeze, according to this 2012 outlook issued Friday from Fronterion, a group that tracks such matters for law firms.

One problem the report identified: wages are rising in developing countries such as India (per this projection from Aon Hewitt) but remain relatively soft here in the U.S. and the U.K. That could hamper profitability for the legal process outsource (LPO) industry as a whole—something unlikely to bring tears to the eyes of job-hunting young  lawyers stateside.

So what’s the problem? The price gap has narrowed between offshore legal processing groups—which charge between $25-$35 an hour for basic legal services such as document review—and domestic services offered by contract review attorneys in places such as the Midwest, which might charge $25 to $30 per hour. (Here Fronterion cites our own Vanessa O’Connell’s piece this June on lawyer temps).

The glut of new law school graduates in 2012 will likely put offshore legal services outfits at a further disadvantage, the report found.  “Most legal professionals, all things being equal, prefer to keep legal work domestically,” it said.  In response, some offshore vendors are opening up in places such as Chicago and Washington D.C., said Fronterion managing Principal Michael Bell.

via Legal Outsourcing: Is the Bloom Already off the Rose? – Law Blog – WSJ.

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In-House Compliance Requires Company-Wide Efforts | Corporate Counsel

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When Frances McLeod and Greg Mason need to find missing money or probe a company’s compliance programs, they construct and analyze large datasets of the company’s financial transactions. About 75 percent of their global forensic accounting business is driven by compliance and enforcement issues, particularly those related to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)—a priority area for U.S. regulators, and a top concern for general counsel.

Even though they’ve consulted with corporations and assessed market risks the world over, McLeod continues to be amazed by gaps in company compliance programs that bear on bribery and illicit payments. “There are a lot of companies that still don’t get it,” says McLeod, who worked in investment banking and on international banking and money-laundering investigations before co-founding Forensic Risk Alliance, a consultancy, in 1999.

via In-House Compliance Requires Company-Wide Efforts.

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Government Misconduct in FCPA Prosecution May Impact Other Cases | National Law Journal

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A federal judge’s dismissal of convictions in a high-profile Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case because of prosecutorial misconduct has prompted a defense attorney in a related prosecution to challenge the government’s case against his client.

U.S. District Judge Howard Matz in Los Angeles on Dec. 1 threw out the convictions of Lindsey Manufacturing Co. and two of its senior executives on charges that they paid an intermediary to bribe two officials of a Mexican utility in violation of the FCPA. Matz cited numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct, including an FBI agent’s false statements to the grand jury and false information in affidavits submitted for search and seizure warrants.

via Government Misconduct in FCPA Prosecution May Impact Other Cases.

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Wal-Mart Discloses Internal FCPA Review – WSJ

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. disclosed late Thursday that it had started an internal review into potential violations of a U.S. foreign bribery law.

The global retailer said in its quarterly report that it had voluntarily contacted the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission about the investigation.

“[T]he Company has begun an internal investigation into whether certain matters, including permitting, licensing and inspections, were in compliance with the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” the company said.

via Wal-Mart Discloses Internal FCPA Review – Corruption Currents – WSJ.

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District of Delaware Adopts Revised Default Standards for Discovery : Electronic Discovery Law

December 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Effective yesterday, the District of Delaware has adopted revised default standards for discovery, including electronic discovery.  The standards cover a broad range of e-discovery issues from cooperation and proportionality to preservation, privilege, and format of production, among others.  Clearly intended to provide more than just general guidance to parties before the court, the default standards are quite specific (e.g, identification of categories of ESI not presumptively subject to preservation and mandated formats for production) and parties are therefore advised to carefully consult the guidelines when practicing in the District of Delaware.

via District of Delaware Adopts Revised Default Standards for Discovery : Electronic Discovery Law.

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