Two men exonerated after 30 years in prison by retrocomputing enthusiasts and the Bloop Museum, by extracting data from a damaged floppy disc.
Also: 30+ years for rape? While rape is a hateful crime, usually people don't get all that prison time for that.
That's what you get when you're poor, black and homeless?
The other unjustly accused guy, who was black but not poor and not homeless got much less time and went out of prison twenty years ago
And if you're rich, white and and a student athlete at Stanford you only get 6 months in jail.
Like the convicted rapist Brock Turner, who now goes by Allen Turner, but is still a convicted rapist?
What a cool tech story. What a heartbreaking human story.
From the article here's the link to a news story about the wrongful conviction:
The price for that GREASEWEAZLE is really good, around just 25 euro! Anyone ever tried it? I have two floppies that have sentimental value for me. One is from elementary school, I wanted to do a backup five years ago with an USB drive and fucking Windows Defender "cleaned" a boot virus by quick formatting the drive. The USB drive ignored the status of the "read only" tab and allowed that. I wasn't able to recover the data with any data recovery software (it shows empty because the MBR has gone) but the data is there, visible with an hex editor from a full image
The other is from middle school but there's a zip file that I can't copy because of a damaged sector. I would still be pointless, right?
It works on a different level than a lot of tools. You need an actual floppy drive to hook it to, but it records the raw flux data on the disc. That's the layer "below" a filesystem.
There are then tools that will convert the flux image into a filesystem that can be mounted or modified with disc image editing tools.
This thing sounds "right up my ally". When I can justify the purchase...
I’m not sure why the data recovery software isn’t working given that you can see it with a hex editor. I mean, it’s been 35 years and change since I fired up Norton Utilities, but it sounds like the data should be recoverable as long as it hasn’t been overwritten, and even then it should be partially recoverable.
Whether a partial recovery is useful depends entirely on the type of file. The zip file might be dead but there might be a recovery path there, too.
It’s not a lot of money to give it a shot, but maybe also talk to the linux users group at your closest university or posting to communities that are populated by people who get into the low level stuff. If it’s for a system that was popular at the time (Apple, Amiga, some types of PCs), you might be able to find a retro computing hobbyist community directly. We’d do stuff like that in exchange for beer when I was in college.
Have you tried photorec on them? The deep dive tool in the suite that I can't remember the name of will ignore the missing MBR and just look for file markers in the raw data. I've only ever used it on Linux but there is a Windows version too.
You can run it ona copy of the image to protect the original
I also vaguely recall a tool called zipfix for broken zip files that will allow you to extract all but the broken parts.
I tried but it can't find anything, probably because of signatures. It's just some text files (no header) and that could be found with the hex editor but then there's an executable inside to interpret them. Being that old I don't remember what program is that.
Maybe I should find that image and post here if someone has it
I just recovered an entire 6tb drive that was accidentally formatted using HDDSuperClone from a linuxlive USB.
Pretty much make the live usb and boot into Linux. Open "DMDE" to view the files on the formatted USB and copy it to another drive.
Give testdisk a run. I've had pretty good luck with it and it's FOSS
Brilliant!!!
I wish I were smart enough to make those jumps !!!
👍 well done
Great article, but I wish you didn't have to link to a Mastodon post that links to a Patreon post that links to the article.
Lemmy post links directly to Patreon hosted blog post that has most relevant story details. I linked the toot in Lemmy post body to credit the source from which I learned of this.
This is how it looks in Voyager:
Absolutely great work. Never would have even considered a steno.
"this guy came to report a missing wallet, let's add him to the list of the suspects" - what kind of reasoning is this???
I mean, I feel like that's classic cop reasoning....
It's cop "reasoning". They're barely literate and their investigation isn't to find the guilty party, it's so they can find someone that blame will stick to.
Police reasoning, d'uh.
Certifying to become a police officer requires less hours than finishing a Street Fighter game.