LITIGATION SUPPORT TIP OF THE NIGHT

Last week, the Court of Appeals of Michigan issued a decision, People v. Haywood, No. 342729, 2019 Mich. App. LEXIS 7628 (Mich. Ct. App. Dec. 3, 2019), affirming a lower court's conviction of the Defendant for discharging a firearm in a dwelling and for assault.   In its decision the Court noted that while it felt the trial court made a mistake in finding that a videotape of a police interrogation was not intentionally deleted, it did not find that the police department acted in bad faith.  The police routinely recorded over hard drives.  ". . . while this practice may be unwise, the defendant did not demonstrate that the department acted with knowledge that exculpatory material was on those tapes or that the department destroyed the tapes after the court's order for the production of the original. Defendant argued at trial that the destruction of the original video also destroyed metadata that was necessary for his expert's complete analysis. Again, we note that the expert's affidavit is not in the record. There is no evidence to suggest that the police department was aware that it was destroying metadata when it deleted the original video or the impact that the destruction of metadata would have on a forensic analysis of the video."  Id. at *18.   

The Court of Appeals also rejected the Defendant's argument, under the Michigan best evidence rule, that a duplicate of the original video recording should be inadmissible because it omitted alleged threats a police officer made to the Defendant's mother and brother on the original video.  The officer alleged to have made the threats testified that he had omitted them from an official report and said they were not threats because the mother could be prosecuted if a firearm were found in her home. 

Rick Borstein posted a study about Adobe's ClearScan OCR software which can generate text searchable images that are clear and smaller in size than those with Acrobat's standard OCR tool.    The standard method overlays invisible searchable text over the original image.  An image of about 300 dpi will be 15 KB to 40 KB per page.    The image slows down printing and appears clearly different than a PDF created from an electronic document.  

Starting with an image only 78 page PDF of 1.13 MB, Borstein found that ClearScan generated a searchable image of 401 KB in the same time the standard OCR tool took to generate an image of 1.24 MB.

ClearScan works by generating a custom font for scanned images, rather than attempting to match them to a library of fonts.   

According to Borstein, OCR quality in ClearScan matches that of standard OCR.  It does have the disadvantage of disabling the touch-up text tool.   

It's possible to go from a searchable image to ClearScan text, but not vice versa.    

My own experiment shows how ClearScan sharpens the font. 

It sounds crazy, but my two most recent visits to Fedex shipping centers have left me with the impression that a ban on bankers boxes may be imposed. First, a Fedex agent insisted on repacking documents from my bankers box in Fedex boxes, and warned these boxes would no longer be accepted.

Tonight at the same location I was told that they are starting to enforce a rule against boxes with openings on the side that function as handles. She accepted the box anyway but I wonder what will happen the next time I need to hustle something over at the last minute.

Fedex’s packing guidelines, https://www.fedex.com/downloads/shared/packagingtips/howtopack.pdf , specify that bankers boxes can’t weight more than 30 pounds and that the box should be secured with 2 inch packing tape placed on in a tic-tac-toe pattern. However it doesn’t appear to restrict the use of bankers boxes with grip gals, something nearly all have.   

Last week, Judge William H. Orrick issued a decision, Bailey v. Nurmi, No. 3:19-cv-07669-WHO, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 210931 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 6, 3019), granting a temporary restraining order against the defendant, a Chief Technology Officer for Thorium Cybersecurity. It was shown that Nurmi received actual notice and that Bailey would suffer irreparable harm and greater hardship than Nurmi. The Court enjoined Nurmi from, “accessing, manipulating, altering, or destroying the source code or other confidential information he has allegedly stolen from Thorium's online accounts.”. Id. at *1.

Nurmi resides in Luxembourg and must be served pursuant to the Hague Convention, Before Bailey can get relief beyond the TRO he must serve the documents in French and German to the proper central authority in Luxembourg. Judge Orrick extended the TRO to the maximum allowed by Fed R. Civ. P. 65(b)(2) - 28 days.


Bailey is is the CEO of Thorium, the designer of Ambitrace, software used to trace sensitive data. Nurmi allowed the company’s domain names to expire and also drank excessively. Bailey used Signal to serve a summons on Nurmi which confirmed he received it.

Irreparable harm was established by the fact that Baliey was locked out of Google Apps; Amazon Web Services; and GitHub.   

As noted in the Tip of the Night for June 26, 2018, Windows 10 doesn't have all of the codecs necessary to play video MPEG files.   If you get a mpeg that plays audio but does not display the video in Windows Media Player, try opening the file in the free media player VLC.  VLC will not only play both the video and the audio together, but you can use it to convert the file to a format which will play in Windows Media Player. 

In the Media menu go to Convert, and select the file you need to convert.   Click on the Convert/Save button at the bottom.   As the profile, select, 'Video for MPEG4 720p TV/device' and then choose the name and location of the destination file.

 A new video file will be generated that Windows Media Player can play normally. 

Files with the extension rst are reStructuredText files, a plain text format used by Python to generate documentation with more complex formatting.   They can be used with the Docutils library, but if you're looking for a quick and easy to convert .rst files, try installing the RST (reStructuredText) Viewer and Editor app for Chrome. 

Enter the text from the .rst file on the left, click the 'View as PDF' button at the top, and on the right a formatted PDF will be generated.  

Head's up!  Be on the lookout for malicious Python libraries!  As reported by Developer Tech and Naked Security there is an imposter version of the popular library dateutill which is called python3-dateutil with a one '1' at the end instead of a lowercase L, 'l'.   The malicious library can steal keys for Secure Shell (SSH), a network encryption protocol, and GnuPG Privacy guard, encryption software.

You can confirm which python modules you have installed with the pip freeze command.   In your scripts directory simply enter, 'pip freeze'. 

. . . and a list of installed modules will be generated.