Update: EnCase Portable Pricing – HOLY (insert expletive here)

Yesterday an email came through from Guidance stating that they are now taking pre-orders for their new EnCase Portable product.  The email didn’t contain any pricing infomation, as is typical in this day and age, but went on to extoll the wonderful features of said product.

Later, while looking at the emails I receive from the CCE mailing list I was shocked to see that someone was reporting that the cost of EnCase Portable is $2995 per license plus $599 for a year’s maintenance.  So the obvious question would be: Has Guidance completely lost the plot?

This software is used solely for acquiring data so why is it more expensive that buying a single license of EnCase Forensic edition? With a little training (and significantly less cost) an acquisition of a computer could be made with a forensic boot disc instead. If you want to accomplish the same thing as EnCase Portable you could create a logical evidence file by using Windows FE (Forensic Edition) with EnCase Forensic installed.

One has to wonder at this pricing, especially when competing products are becoming more mainstream and receiving more public backing.

These prices have come from an email and may not be accurate, I will state when I’ve been able to confirm.

******UPDATE*******

A comment has been left by someone claiming to represent Guidance Software. This comment reads:

“Guidance Software contacted customers this week offering its maximum discount initial purchases—$750 for government and $900 for commercial customers. This product is all about convenience and leveraging available resources to make forensically sound collections to help the experts do their jobs. Guidance Software is also offering free training, even for non-customers, in August.”

We shall see if this pans out.

Simon’s Faraday Experiment

Simon has recorded a short video in which he attempts to create a faraday tent on the cheap.  Will he be successful? Watch and find out.

Get in Touch

In an attempt to make the podcast a bit more friendly and introduce a social element I have added more means of contacting us.  I hope that, by doing this, we can involve you a bit more in the show.  If there’s a good article or news item that you think would be good for the show drop us a line.  If you leave us a voicemail we’ll do our best to get it played on the show (assuming it is relevant and not littered with inappropriate content).

The contact information is given below:

• You can comment on each posting
• Email us at lee@forensic4cast.com
• UK Voicemail – 0709 288 9434
• USA Voicemail – (435) 565 4533
• USA SMS – (435) 565 4533

Also Simon and I are both on Twitter.  Simon can be found at twitter.com/englishgit and I can be found at twitter.com/schizophreud.

I’m sorry if you don’t live in the UK or USA. You can still send in voice messages via email if you wish, just keep the attachment below 20MB.

Forensic 4cast Awards – Replay

For those of you that missed the extravaganza of the Forensic 4cast Awards, it is available for second viewing courtesy of ustream.

Please pardon the quality. We were working on a limited budget (nil) but we tried and we’ll continue to get better.

Forensic 4cast Awards – Announcement

As I’m sure you’ve already heard, the Forensic 4cast Awards are upon us.  This Sunday (19th July 2009) at 2pm Eastern the awards will be broadcast across the internet. You can view it right here on the Forensic 4cast website.

We have had a flood of votes but every vote counts.  Please take 5 minutes out of your day to send your votes to ‘vote@forensic4cast.com’.  The nominations can be found here.

In order to make things a little more interesting, and to encourage more people to vote each person that votes will have his/her name entered into a draw and, at the conclusion of the ceremony, a random drawing will be made.  The winner will receive an exclusive Forensic 4cast t-shirt (so exclusive that Simon and I don’t even have them yet).

Get voting you only have until the end of Friday.

Episode 18 – Standing Room Only

This is our longest episode to date, 1 hour and 45 minutes. We’ll try to keep it down in the future.

Lance Mueller joins us for an interview, we also discuss the Sixth Amendment, the RIAA and Mediasentry, and virtual porn.

One more thing…

Don’t forget to vote in the Forensic 4cast Awards.