Re: SAVxxx TAPES: undoubtfully identifying NOT-local origin (e.g. jury Court room)

Also a 'non-legal' response, but at a low enough detail could not a real technical expert detect if the tracks on the tape were written by a particular tape drive? I mean how low down do you go to prove this. Clearly IBM i cannot tell anything about the physcial tracks but I bet you could get an expert to figure that out for enough money.

From a practical perspective would it make sense to have a program that does some flavor of checksum or hash of the data by library for example as it goes to the drive. Record that somewhere else with the tape volume and date. Now on restore validate to what was recorded. Still not infallible but the odds of a modified library matching the checksum/hash have got to be astronomically microscopic. This is a pretty normal process for software distributed for Linux for example.

- DrFranken

On 4/14/2010 2:34 PM, Lukas Beeler wrote:

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 20:29,<rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think that goes into the "beyond reasonable doubt". The jury can be
explained to how it can be overridden and then they can make an informed
decision as to likeliness.

I'm not a lawyer and not familiar with US laws at all, but from a
technical perspective it's quite clear - you can't tell who or which
machine has written to the tape, if you assume malicious interference.