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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I know its for use by trained professionals and all but good lord, there's hot wires just hanging out all over the place. In the "advanced methods" they actually advocate disassembling the wall plug and cutting hot leads while the building wiring is still live.

If I were the forensics guy, I'd want hazard pay to use this thing. Is the "evidence" gathered by this method even valid after you've stuck thumb drives in it and driven it around in your van while its still running in read/write mode?

Edit: I've just thought of a wonderful addition to truecrypt involving the accelerometer... Anyone involved in the TrueCrypt Foundation here? Icanhazplz?

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good lord, there's hot wires just hanging out all over the place

No there's not. There's one hot (exposed) plug which is only exposed while you plug it into the power strip. There's another hot plug which is only exposed when you unplug it from the wall and isn't exposed anymore when you plug it into the UPS.

For someone who works with electronics for a living and just stormed a building with the SWAT team, I can't imagine that this is an unbelievable amount of risk. Get some rubber gloves and you're good.

(I'll also note that opening an original Macintosh was about 100x more dangerous.)

Edit: I've just thought of a wonderful addition to truecrypt involving the accelerometer... Anyone involved in the TrueCrypt Foundation here? Icanhazplz?

4 years ago when openbsd got a driver for the thinkpad accelerometers, i wrote a little utility that would watch the values and if it detected a sudden movement, it would run a script to lock the screen, remove ssh key passphrases from memory, etc.

i had an irrational fear of someone running into my office and stealing my laptop but i'd always forget it was running and would get up with the laptop and end up locking everything.

it would be useful in a server or desktop system since they should never move (and thus it could do something more drastic like a fast shutdown and power off) but since they never move they probably don't have accelerometers built in anyway.

But you could put an accelerometer hooked into the usb header on most motherboards.

ialertu is an GPL'd app for the macbook that, stupidly, sounds an alarm when the built-in accelerometer indicates that the macbook was moved. You could modify it to do something worthwhile instead, like lock the screen and shut down.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ialertu/

they actually advocate disassembling the wall plug and cutting hot leads while the building wiring is still live.

Isn't that kind of the point? How else would you do it?

Maybe you just shouldn't do it at all?

Edit: On downvote. No, I'm serious, sometimes you just shouldn't do some things despite the technical possibility because they can't be done safely in a practical real-world setting.

There's probably very few ways to ride an elephant to the airport as well, but a taxi might be a better choice. Now I'll admit that I can't think of a better way to "seize a running computer" off the top of my head but ripping open the wall and hacking at live wires just doesn't strike me as the very best way. Lets be sure we're not riding elephants here.

It is perfectly possible to do safe work on live wiring, although health and safety regulations generally require that this is done only as a last resort. It does occur quite regularly, though, and as long as it's done properly the risk is minimal.

Considering government usually has an exemption clause to health and safety anyway, I don't think the FBI are going to be worrying about it that much.

Can you name one common instance of where working on live wires is done quite regularly. I'm not talking about the guys flying around in helicopters inspecting HV lines. Firemen don't even do that. They go straight to the breaker and kill it for the building.

So where else is handling live wiring done. I'm honestly curious.

Adding new breakers is one situation where live working happens quite a lot in a commercial setting.

Power companies use a whole range of live working - the guys in helicopters are a minority, but there's a lot more mundane stuff done live:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live-line_working

Actually, couldn't you cut into the power cable instead of the wall plug?

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