WP reporter giving BAD INFO on CNN, re: terror alerts

[Atman]

Heidi "Heidi" Collins just asked Steve Coll of the Washington Post why the terror alert was based upon 4 year old information. He claimed that "as you know, when you open a file on your computer, the computer places a time stamp on it. It appears these files have been opened since they were first discovered."

WHA-WHA-WHAaaaaat?

So, Steve, who opened it last and found out it had been opened before, and didn't THAT "time stamp" overwrite the one supposedly found when it was, uh...opened? Jesus fucking christ, the Fourth Estate is completely complicite in spreading Bush disinformation! This is one deserves a bout of letter-writing! CNN SUCKS!

[lapfog_1]

1. Time of last access

is a notoriously bad indicator of file activity. Lots of things
can affect this field (at least in Unix systems), things like
backups, certain types of file moves, file system searches
(like a google, but of your local files), and so on. You can
never depend on this to tell you the last time the file was
"used" i.e. referenced by something human directed. File modify
dates are much more useful.

That said, there are also many forensic tools that one can use
to inspect directory and file contents that will not change any
of the meta data.

Take it from an old file system developer.

I'm sure things are similar in windows, but I haven't studied NTFS
or other windows file systems.