

Facebook Cites ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of Fraud by Paul Ceglia - ssclafani
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-05/facebook-cites-smoking-gun-proof-of-fraud-by-man-claiming-company-stake.html

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stanleydrew
Wow. There is almost no extra information in this article beyond the title. I
suppose there is a brief history of the dispute, but nothing at all related to
the"smoking gun evidence" besides the original statement and a couple of "no-
comment" follow ups.

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tptacek
Facebook petitioned the court and obtained permission to contract a forensics
firm to inspect Ceglia's hard drive. My understanding is that the firm
Facebook is working with is Stroz Friedberg, which has an exceedingly good
reputation. As a result of the investigation, Facebook has now filed a motion
saying they have obtained what amounts to clear evidence that Ceglia forged
the contract he claims proves his ownership stake in Facebook.

Facebook cannot publicly disclose the evidence their firm found, because they
are bound by a confidentiality order that accompanied their access to Ceglia's
personal computers.

What more do you want Bloomberg to report? This is clearly a big deal. I see
how they aren't fully satisfying your curiosity, but currency and accuracy are
probably more important in a news org than "most satisfying writing".

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Mrich30
I wonder how such analysis is conducted. are there experts for both parties
present? Or just the judge? Seems strange to allow one of the parties access
to the computer, there should be a neutral person operating the computer and
only do stuff after both parties agree to it. Could take some time though...

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evgen
It is unlikely that FB was given free reign to the original hardware. A more
likely case is that they were given a duped version of the drives.

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mcao
A duped drive would be useless. When you delete a file, the OS marks it as
gone, but the data is still physically on the drive until you overwrite it
with more data. The forensics team would need access to the original drive to
uncover that data.

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wglb
Don't such forensic activities do a sector-for-sector copy of the original
hard drive and work from there? So the access they need to the drive is
limited to the time it takes to do an image copy.

So if by "duped drive" you mean an image copy, it is not useless.

