John Markoff in the New York Times has a detailed article on the emergence of software tools to help in the analysis of electronic documents (and, one could easily presume, scanned and OCR’d physical documents) in litigation: Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time […]
OK, just last week I wrote a post on a report out of UCSD regarding difficulties in erasing data from solid-state disks (SSDs). But now out of Australia comes a somewhat contradictory report that some SSDs actually erase ‘slack’ (unused) space themselves without any user or system intervention — and, furthermore, that they can do […]
E-discovery — the recovery, analysis, and production of evidence stored in digital form on various media — has become a major issue in litigation because of how much data simple devices can hold and the resulting duplication and multiplication of documents, files, and other digital types of evidence. Because of the risks and costs of […]
[Instalanche™ in progress, and I had no clue until I started getting e-mails about the post. I’ve gotten more hits today on this web site than I’ve had here in the past 12 months combined. Ah, the power of Instapundit — thanks, Glenn! Thanks also to Elie Mystal over at Above The Law for the […]
US District Court Judge Andrew Gilford (Central District of California) granted a summary judgment motion (PDF, 47KB) in DealerTrack v. Huber et al., finding DealerTrack’s patent (US 7,181,427) — for an automated credit application processing system — invalid due to the recent In re Bilski court decision that requires a patent to either involve “transformation” […]
Classic patterns in disputed IT project: Hertz v. Accenture
Just ran across this article at the always-irreverent-but-usually-spot-on Register, an IT news site out of England. The standard patterns of a troubled IT project are so evident in this one report that I may well use it as a case study for my CS 428 (“Real-world software engineering”) class this fall. Here are some of […]
Neverending Story pattern: School District ERP system late, over-budget
A story a few days ago caught my eye, not because it was unusual, but because it follows so familiar a pattern. Here are a few excerpts from the article: MANATEE — Late nights, hefty contracts and humming computers are a norm in the district’s School Support Center, where employees are working to fix a […]
Minnesota DMV software project: Faulty Towers/Neverending Story patterns
In my 2000 white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: System Failure (1976-2000)” [PDF], which I researched and wrote while at PricewaterhouseCoopers, I describe six broad fact patterns to classify the types of software system implementation failure. One of those patterns I named “Faulty Towers”: The client buys the system from [or has the system developed […]
![The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]](http://bfwa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/intel-cpu-150x150.jpg "The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]")
Back in 2000, PricewaterhouseCooper published my research white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF). This paper reflected research I and my staff had done over several months on roughly 120 two- or three-party lawsuits involving information technology. I found that almost all of these lawsuits fell into one or two of six […]