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October, 2016
Digital Forensics Rescues Retro Video Games
Continued from page 1
from the Atari game cartridges, 5.25 in. inch floppy discs, magnetic tape and other deteriorating storage me- dia that held it. That salvaged data is now safely archived on servers at the Stanford Digital Repository and has been added to NIST’s National Soft- ware Reference Library, a resource that supports digital forensic investiga- tions.
This collection has
ob vious appeal for retro gamers, but its value is much more than nostalgic. “Most of human cul-
ture today is created and consumed using digital software,” says Henry Lowood, who, as curator of the History of Science and Technology Collec- tion at the Stanford Uni- versity Library, led the library’s effort. “How we write has changed. How we commu- nicate has changed. Art, education and entertainment have all been changed by the advent of computing and software. We wouldn’t be able to say much about the evolution of hu- man culture in the late 20th century without collections like this.”
Digital Forensics Every time a book is published,
a copy is deposited at the Library of Congress. Other institutions are ded- icated to archiving music and film. But there is no single repository where software goes to be preserved
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the past, the data from these scatter- ing experiments has been analyzed using “least squares fitting” statisti- cal techniques to infer a material’s crystallographic structure. But these techniques are limited; they can tell researchers what a material’s struc- ture is likely to be — but they don’t fully describe the variability or un- certainty within the material’s struc- ture, because they don’t describe the answers using probabilities. “Least squares is a straightfor-
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ward technique, but it doesn’t allow us to describe the inferred crystallo- graphic structure in a way that an- swers the questions that the materi- als scientists want to ask,” says Alyson Wilson, a professor of statis- tics at NC State and co-author of the paper. “But we do have other tech- niques that can help address this challenge, and that’s what we’ve done with this research.” In reality, the space between
atoms isn’t constant — it’s not fixed throughout a sample. And the same is true for every aspect of a material’s structure. “Understanding that vari- ability, now possible with this new approach, allows us to characterize materials in a new, richer way,” Jones says. This is where Bayesian statis-
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for the ages. There is one that comes close,
however: NIST’s National Software Reference Library (NSRL), a vast and constantly updated archive of software titles in their numerous versions. The NSRL is the largest publicly-known collection of its kind in the world.
NIST maintains this
A copy of Mario Bros. (1983) from the Cabrinety collection.
collection not to preserve cultural history, but to provide a forensic tool for law enforcement and na- tional security investiga- tors. NIST runs every file in the NSRL through a hashing algorithm that generates a virtually unique digital fingerprint for each, over 180 million of them so far, and makes them available to the public.
When investigators
seize a computer as evi- dence, they use those dig-
ital fingerprints as a known file filter, so they can quickly separate irrelevant files from those that might contain ev- idence. For instance, after Malaysia Air-
lines flight MH370 disappeared some- where over the Pacific in March 2014, the FBI called NIST. “They wanted every hash of every file associated with every flight simulator we had,” says Doug White, the NIST computer scientist who runs the NSRL. “All the maps. All the routes. They wanted every flight path the pilot might have
Continued on page 28 How Atoms Are Arranged...
tics comes into play. “For example, atoms vibrate,” Wilson says. “And the extent of the vibration is con- trolled by their temperature. Re- searchers want to know how those vi- brations are influenced by tempera- ture for any given material. And Bayesian tools can give us probabili- ties of these thermal displacements in a material.” “This approach will allow us to
analyze data from a wide variety of materials characterization tech- niques — all forms of spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, you name it — and more fully characterize all kinds of matter,” Jones says. “Honestly, it’s very exciting,” he adds. Jones is also the director of NC State’s Analytical Instrumentation Facility, which houses many of these types of instru- ments.
“We also plan to use these tech-
niques to combine data from differ- ent types of experiments, in order to offer even more insights into materi- al structure,” Wilson says. The paper, “Use of Bayesian In-
ference in Crystallographic Struc- ture Refinement via Full Diffraction Profile Analysis,” is published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. Lead authors of the paper are Chris Fancher, who is a postdoctoral re- searcher at NC State, and Zhen Han, a former Ph.D. student at NC State. Co-authors include Igor Levin of NIST; Katharine Page of ORNL; Bri- an Reich, an associate professor of statistics at NC State; and Ralph Smith, a distinguished professor of mathematics at NC State. r
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