Saint Petersburg International Legal Forum 2013

At the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum I gave a presentation on forensic investigation digital evidence within Europe also from our ENFSI Forensic IT Working group perspective. This conference was very well attended. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev opened the conference and our Minister of Security and Justice Ivo Opstelten gave a presentation from the celebration of 400 years collaboration between the Netherlands and Russia. 

Many questions where asked during the forum meetings, and lots of discussion. Also the standardization of Digital Evidence and the ISO 17025 with the new ISO-standards on digital evidence where seen as an important step on harmonization. 

In the meantime I was also looking in bitcoin mining and the properties of bitcoins as well as cloud computing on virtual machines, since there were some questions concerning forensic investigations. I installed some mining software on different cloud virtual machines of different vendors, however as mentioned, it is not cost effective, and certainly energy waisting. Buying ASIC hardware might be more cost effective in the short term, however I assume that either the exchange rate of bitcoins will drop if it gets to easy or the complexity is improved in the meantime. It is interesting to see some of the discussions on forensic investigation of these bitcoins. One can pay with them at Amazon, and at conferences such as Ohm 2013. However bitcoins might disappear according to strategists.