Folks, put the news story in some context before you light your torches. And if you decide to light them, come after me.
On July 11, the NetAnalysis developers blogged on their website about the difficulty of parsing the Firefox 2 history file. They also essentially bragged about how their latest release (which they noted was NOT used by OCSO) could parse the file but a competitor program (obviously CacheBack) could not.
On that same day, Mr. Bradley of CacheBack responded with a "press release" detailing his own pin-ball trip through the Anthony case and the fact that his program contained bugs similar to the earlier NetAnalysis program. He points out that those bugs could have easily been identified and fixed if only OCSO had told him there were discrepancies.
Mr. Bradley's "press release" was not actually sent to anyone in the press, so effectively it was nothing more than a blog entry seen by the 4 or 5 people around the world that read those things.
Yesterday morning, for whatever reason, I wondered if Mr. Bradley had ever fixed his program and what he said about it on his website. If you recall, BAEZ gave him a hard time because he had a "news release" stating that his software was being used in the Casey Anthony case. It was at that point I stumbled upon his "press release".
I exchanged emails with Mr. Bradley asking if I could quote his release in the Hinky Meter post I planned to write. He said yes. I offered to let him proof-read my post and he accepted.
The dates Mr. Bradley used in his timeline - erroneously recalled from memory - seemed to indicate the State must have known of the error when they crossed Cindy Anthony. I did not point this out. Mr. Bradley did not. Neither did Val. Mr. Hornsby noticed it.
If this had fallen on the "Casey is guilty side" there would have been accolades and high-fives all around. Because it did not fall on that side, it should have been sleuthed more closely by Richard, me, others. It was not.
In the meantime, the NYT ran across the story. I don't know if it was dumb luck, if they saw it on the Hinky, or if Mr. Hornsby's connections to WESH alerted them to the story. Whatever happened, "real journalists" took hold and the true facts were sent through a food processor.
Because the story became big news, the State was compelled to respond. In preparing their response they contacted Mr. Bradley and informed him that part of his timeline was exactly one week off. It happens to the best of us. He corrected it.
The State is absolved.
The press did not do its homework. Including me.
The defense looks (once again) like pile divers.
The computer forensics lab at the OCSO looks like they dropped the ball.