12 years of Digital Photography

Having been taking photos using digital technologies since 2000 I have decided to consolidate my photos that have spread out over multiple drives and computers. This reminds me why I was so pissed off with Joshua Sham and my subsequent dealings with Wayne McAlpine and OneWorld.

It was the back and recovery of digital photos that set me off on my series of posts relating to the OneWorldDataRecovery service that I saw on the Canada Computers website. I was probably in the process of purchasing an additional drive to backup my photos when I came across it and thought that it was too good to be true. I made a blog post to that effect and I received a comment from Joshua Sham, shown below:

Joshua has left a new comment on your post "One World Data Recovery Protection Plan":

You obviously didn't read the website properly. First off, I wanted my DATA back, and I paid $$$ to get my DATA. I didn't care about getting my hard disk back because I wanted my pictures from my vacation to New York.
The $14.99 does cover the cost of the actual data recovery. There are no other charges other than those listed in the FAQ. Get your facts straight! Total Bill $220.34 because everybody pays tax. I think you should probably know that data recovery from CBL or seagate start at $400 and climb easily to $2000 and more. Good luck with your blank drive through the manufacturers warranty. A whole lot of good that will do you when you want back your DATA.

The comment was followed by a series of other communications from Joshua Sham and Wayne McAlpine and it became clear that the original comment was not only a Shill comment (Joshua was an employee of Wayne McAlpine) but it was also "blog Spam" (i.e. it was only made in an attempt to show the OneWorld service in a good light).

I took exception to the statement that I didn't read the website (OneWorld's) correctly and I was subsequently proved right, the service WAS to good to be true.

The fact that Joshua was claiming that he got his data back from his New York trip struck a note with me. I am not sure of his math and the total bill of $220.34 for his data recovery, that sounded like an awful amount of tax! but, that was not the main issue I was commenting on.

Links:

• My post on Joshua Sham - the Shill
• The truth about Wayne McAlpine and Oneworld.

Using Robocopy to backup My Documents

Having attempted to use robocopy.exe to make a backup of a users data files I came across the following behavior.

I was trying to be "pure" and use the command line and not just to use drag and drop using Windows Explorer. The theory here was not only that it should provide a more robust copy, i.e. I could restart the copy if it was interrupted, but also I could then incorporate the command into a backup script.

It became obvious that the file structure for Windows 7 was not as simple as it first might appear and I was concerned that all the iPad and iTunes files, plus others, were being copied as well as the contents of the directory that I wanted a copy of. The resulting copy reported 52G Bytes of data when the actual data that I wanted to copy was only 8G Bytes. The copy took 1.5 hours as opposed to a matter of minutes for the copy that I wanted.

Junction Points and the solution:

Like a lot of the replies you see to problems that you find on blogs and forums this is no exception. Many of the solutions posted had nothing to do with the original question. However, having read the solution (linked below) it made sense to what I was seeing.

The answer was to use the /XJ switch telling robocopy to ignore the Junctions or the directories that the Windows 7 file system includes behind the scenes.

Running the help for robocopy shows that the response detailing the answer to the problem is actually the case. I guess that I could have worked out the problem for myself.

The other thing that is confusing is that the answer on the Microsoft Windows 7 forum is that it is not easy to see who is replying to whom. The answers are there but a lot of what there is in the post is occluded. The original question was phrased in a way that an infinite loop was being seen, my problem and solution was not that but I guess that I could have been fooled into thinking that there was one.

In addition, there is another answer to what I was seeing in the Microsoft forum replies. A commenter was warning that there could be other problems if a robocopy command was used to change the target of a junction directory as there would be problems in the future. In my case the copy on the target drive ended up hidden as I guess that the permissions and/or the resulting junction confused Windows Explorer when the drive was viewed. Searching the drive for the copied files revealed that the files were there but could not be seen. I will have to re-format the target drive as the disc space is being used but I cannot see the files!

Links:

• The solution to the problem was found here - see the most helpful reply
• The VistaTips post with a question from Nicholas Hall relating to the copying of "non-permitted" directories.

Folder permissions and other things found when using robocopy:

 In addition to the behaviour that I describe above you may also find that you will get "permission denied"  messages when you try and copy files and directories from the root of a drive. The cause of this is due to a similar to reason as the directories that are attempted to be copied in this instance are again Junction directories.

I covered this on my website in more detail and possibly made another post on this blog. I discussed the command syntax that you need to use to stop the errors due to these "forbidden" directories asking to be copied:

robocopy /mir k:\ \\Mybookworld\public\ /XD dirs $RECYCLE.BIN /XD dirs RECYCLER /XN /XO

In the command above the directories are excluded from the robocopy processing - I had not found a way to set the Windows permissions to allow the copying of these directories. However, I would suggest that you would not want to in any case as it would probably give you problems in the future.

Santa Clara County

Santa Clara County is the region of San Francisco that is the home of Google at Mountain View.

Links:

• When someone complains to Google about your content
• Santa Clara visits
• If you think that you have information about yourself removed from the Web by Google
• You probably think that this blog is about you
• The Googleplex on WikiP

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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Six Strikes and Copyright Law

Today I logged a search for: will peerblock stop the six strike law?

The answer to this is "No" - as Peerblock will not protect you against anything! (see my other posts on the subject). In fact I was not aware that there was a "Six Strikes" law, I thought it was just a proposal by the media industries in an attempt to contain piracy. I will not try to enter into this argument, you can read this for yourself on the links below. I am just taking issue with some of the technological issues that are raised by this discussion.

Following some of the links that I have found on the pages linked below, I take issue with some of the statements that I find.

The discussion here was prompted by some of the comments on the articles I found when making a search for "Six Strikes" - i.e. the article by Ian Paul, PCWorld,    Jul 8, 2011 and others.

Like most forums the nature of the comments is more from the nature of appearing smarter than the other participants and insulting each other.

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RIAA MPAA and CopyrightInformation.org (The Center for Copyright Information)
Hardly an independent organization:

• Executive Vice President & General Counsel - Executive Vice President & General Counsel Steven M. Marks, Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Recording Industry Association of America    (RIAA)

• Member - Marianne Grant, Senior Vice President, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.  (MPAA)

• Chairman - Thomas Dailey, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Verizon Communications, Inc.

Plus representatives from Verizon, Viacom, Comcast, iKeepSafe.org, Future of Privacy Forum, 
Jerry Berman, Chairman, Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee 
Gigi Sohn, President and CEO, Public Knowledge

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Some quotes from the Center for Copyright Information:

I don't really see what the following means:

"..... helping consumers take action to protect themselves, their internet accounts and home networks."

The only ones that are possibly being "protected" are the music and movie industry themselves. I think that it is very much "wishful thinking" on the part of the "industry" here. The threats that they are proposing are not likely to be so, the "six" that is, and they are unlikely to be passed into law.

Also, the information is hardly "educational" as it is purely FUD being spread by the "industry"
"........ the educational information provided in an alert will lead to very few subscribers who persist (or allow others to persist) in illegal file sharing."

It is not likely that those that are persisting in file-sharing  are not likely to be frightened off by idle threats and are more likely to step up their efforts to avoid detection in the first place.

Those allowing others to persist are likely to be the ISPs themselves - I would say in general that the ISPs are more interested in staying clear of the "industry" and are probably just paying lip service to them as they do not want to appear as being um-cooperative or not obeying local laws.

Links:

• ISPs Fight Piracy: Meet the Six Strikes - Ian Paul, PCWorld,    Jul 8, 2011
• Copyright Alert System (CAS) - www.copyrightinformation.org
• Europe seems to be more aggressive with a "3 Strikes" rule

Outlook Web Access

OWA

I came across this when troubleshooting Outlook email, etc, on a corporate network that had done "sour".

A 3rd party IT company were using it temporarily to access an Exchange server while the main accounts, served by PC based Office installations, were rebuilt.

What was not known at the time was if the local Word and Excel files (not to mention the local calendar and contact list) were accessible from OWA.