Book Review

Varsalone, J. (Tech. Ed.), Kubasiak, R.R., Morrissey, S., et al. (2009). Mac OS X, iPod, and iPhone Forensic Analysis DVD Toolkit. Burlington, MA: Syngress. 551 + xix pages, ISBN: 978-1-59749-297-3, US$59.95

Reviewed by Gary C. Kessler
Champlain College
Burlington, VT 05401
gary.kessler@champlain.edu
 

(first four paragraphs of review)

At last! A quality book about computer forensics for Apple products! Alas, I get ahead of myself.

Apple's hold on the personal computer marketplace started dwindling on August 12, 1981, the day that the IBM PC was introduced. As an Apple ][+ bigot myself, I refused to touch a PC for some years. But I was also a command line bigot, so when the first Macintosh was introduced in 1983 and hermetically sealed the operating system from users, I did not go out and buy one. In fact, like many of my era, I did eventually end up on the PC side which, ironically, let me do many of the things that my trusty Apple ][+ had in earlier times -- write code, play with the hardware, and, indeed, get to a command line. And, of course, tons of application developers flocked to the PC because of its open architecture.

So, has Apple been offering better products for the last 25 years? Maybe, maybe not -- but that's not the topic of this book review. The real point of the walk down memory lane is that the PC and Microsoft operating systems have dominated the desktop marketplace since the mid-1980s. For that reason, most computer forensics tools since the 1990s have been written for DOS or Windows platforms with the intent of examining DOS or Windows PC systems. Windows PCs so dominate the computer forensics field as forensics platforms and the target of forensics examinations that some labs will not even take in a Mac systems due to lack of staff expertise.

But the market is changing. Mac sales, at least in North America, have surged in the last few years, largely since Apple embraced Intel hardware and a Unix-based operating system kernel. Portable music players have become nearly ubiquitous in the last few years, with Apple iPods being the gold standard. And mobile phones are ubiquitous -- and the iPhone is setting a new standard for mobile phone functionality.
 

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