Judge Orders TorrentSpy to Turn Over RAM

virgil_disgr4ce writes "In an impressive example of the gap of understanding between legal officials and technology, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian 'found that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.' ZDNet, among others, reports on the ruling and its potential for invasion of privacy."

Comments

What's the problem?

[jonbryce]

Take the chips out of the machine and send them to the other side.

Re:What's the problem?

[Colin Smith]

Exactly what I'd do too.

Re:What's the problem?

[no_pets]

Take the chips out of the machine and send them to the other side. No shit. That is exactly what I would do.

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

The here is if they do so there may be info still on those chips. Ram "clears" itself on power down but info can still be retrieved from it if it's carefully read.

This happens because ram doesn't erase itself after data is moved off of it.

Re:What's the problem?

[benfinkel]

I read a couple of other articles on it (google 'em, easy to find) and basically the Judge understands more than this Slashdot abstract says.

Torrentspy was contending that they had no record of user's IP addresses, since they don't do any IP logging. The Judge has ordered that since, even though there is no logging, the IPs are available in the RAM for a period of time, that constitutes a recording and they were ordered to capture that information from the RAM in a more permanent spot.

This is new because it's the first time that volatile RAM has even been considered as evidence in that manner.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a few minutes later. Not hours or days. The decay is total by then, and there isn't even theoretical equipment that could distinguish its state from noise.

Re:What's the problem?

[MyLongNickName]

Yeah... uh right. I am sure there is some type of theoretical possibility here, but practically no. RAM has to be constantly "refreshed" to keep the charge high enough to be read. After about ten seconds without power, I doubt any instrument would be able to read the state before power down.

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

Think of how ram works.

The reason ram "clears" is that the pointers are lost. It is very possible to retrieve data.

On ram a bit is only flipped high to change its value , if the bit is never flipped again the bit doesn't mysteriously drop to low again , it relies on being over written with a higher bit.

01 must go to 10 before it can reach 11 and must got to 11 before it can be "flipped" to 00 again. All memory works on the same concept.

There you have it my 2 bit example of ram :) Yes pun intended.

Re:What's the problem?

[cyphercell]

So, lick the contacts before mailing right?

Re:What's the problem?

[rsmoody]

If the judge is this much of a moron, he will get the RAM chips, have them installed in a system, discover they are devoid of recoverable data, and then say the defendants are in contempt of court.

Re:What's the problem?

[pixelpusher220]

It also says

(3) the data in issue which is currently routed to a third party entity under contract to defendants

That's the achillies heel, if they are pulling the data out and transmitting it already, they are sunk.

Re:What's the problem?

[MyLongNickName]

Bad form to reply to myself, I know. However, I wanted to make sure my knee jerk reaction wasn't too far off base. I could not find a definitive answer, but see the discharge rate for RAM's capacitors to come out to a "half life" of 0.6 to 0.8 milliseconds. I was surprised by how quickly the charge deteriorates.

If you think forensics is going to be able to do anything with your RAM half a second after the power button is pushed, you are out of luck.

Re:What's the problem?

[RetroGeek]

info can still be retrieved from it if it's carefully read

Wow, I did not know that.

But then all you get is a snapshot of what the server was doing at the instant you turned it off, which would be AFTER all the programs terminated. And at termination the OS would probably re-use that RAM for its own shutdown code.

Then you need to wade through a huge pile of binary (ok HEX) printouts to try to determine the contents.

If the server held 8GBytes, and you get 16 bytes per line, and there are 66 lines per page, then you would have 8,134,407 pages to read through.

Of course you could put this on a drive, then try to use some sort of search program, but it is not trivial. Memory fragmentation(1), binary representation of text, object storage (rather than straight characters) would all contribute to the confusion.

1. Yes I know that the OS tracks the fragmentation along with pagination, but where is that in RAM?

Re:What's the problem?

[cyphercell]

The way I understood, was that volatile memory required current to hold a "1" no current no ones or all "0"s. Zero, is the natural state of the ram.

Re:What's the problem?

[Red Flayer]

I read a couple of other articles on it (google 'em, easy to find)

Replying to a post high in the comments, asking that they not only RTFA, but to Google it and read some other fucking articles?

Sure... and I want a unicorn for my birthday... I'm just as likely to get it.

That said, what you've written makes a whole lot more sense.

The question I have is, how feasible is it to log all IP addresses from the RAM and associate them with the transactions in question?

Re:What's the problem?

[MyLongNickName]

No. These are not physical dip switches. Capacitors have to be constantly recharged to keep the charges that represent all the zeros and ones . Once power is removed, no more data.

Re:What's the problem?

[anotherone]

Then why is non-volatile flash memory so much slower and more expensive?

Re:What's the problem?

[sammy baby]

That oughtta work. I do that recreationally anyway.

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

Like I said depending on the ram.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_ del.html

Completely doable.

I bet this poor page is in for one hell of a /.ing.

Re:What's the problem?

[Detritus]

You might be surprised at how long data can survive in DRAM. Years ago, I experimented with disabling refresh on the memory of a single-board microcomputer. I was surprised to see that the data in DRAM didn't instantly disappear. Most of it was still there, many seconds after refresh had been disabled.

Re:What's the problem?

[grahammm]

If judge or court was to rule that, then the judge and court would be deserving of contempt.

Re:What's the problem?

[AuMatar]

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basicly a capacitor. YOu set it to 1 by charging the capacitor, 0 by letting it discharge. However, due to the natural resistance of silicon there is always some leakage current leaving the capacitors. This means that RAM left alone for more than a few tenths of a milisecond will lose enough voltage to drop to a logical 0. TO prevent this, RAM is constantly refreshed- the ram chip will spend spare cycles writing its own value to itself. SO unless you transfer the computer without unpluggint the ram or powering dowjn the machine, you will not be able to recover any data.

Re:What's the problem?

[TheRaven64]

A bit of DRAM[1] is basically a transistor and a capacitor. Due to the small size of the capacitor, its stored charge leaks away very quickly, on the order of a few milliseconds. A DRAM 'refresh cycle,' which happens around every 64ms in modern RAM, involves reading the value of every bit and re-writing it before it leaks away. This is done in parallel; every bit receives the clock signal and refreshes itself. Storing data in DRAM requires a constant application of energy; as soon as you cut power to RAM, the bits will all be reset to the same value (whether this is one or zero is largely a matter of convention).

Oh, and whoever moderated this informative, please never ever use mod points again.

[1] Main memory in all mainstream machines is DRAM.

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

Exactly , it makes it a trivial task. Which is why I find it dumb to do it , just request an image of the drive , it's so much easier. And since they don't log it won't contain the ips.

I guess the judge could request the logs from the upstream switches and try and compare it with others logs on the box of people who actually do log their traffic, or a simple snmp stream from the upstream router and access to the other sites on the box if its hosting more then 1 site.

Re:What's the problem?

[mythar]

assuming there's no mechanism already in place to log ip addresses, can torrentspy be compelled to write programs to accomplish this? and, what kind of precedence does this set for any kind of service provider that uses a computer?

Re:What's the problem?

[FrankSchwab]

If you're going to comment on a technical subject, at least have some clue as to what you're talking about.

DRAM stores ones and zeros by storing charges on a tiny capacitor. If enough charge is stored, it reads back as a one; if too little charge is stored, it reads back as a zero. Ones are changed to zeros by draining the charge (attaching the capacitor plate to ground). Zeros are changed to ones by storing more charge (attaching the capacitor plate to Vcc). Due to technological limitations in the fabrication of the capacitors, the stored charge on them will dissipate over time - on the order of microseconds. Milliseconds after you remove power (or stop refreshing them), memory will start to become corrupted. Seconds after you remove power, all data will be gone. Within minutes of removing power, not even the most sophisticated probing of the part would be able to tell a one from a zero.

And I have no idea whatsoever where you got that idiotic 01->10->11->00 progression concept. Please wipe that from your mind.

/frank

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

No but there are other things like oxides that are capable of being read. While expensive they do it and it works.

Re:What's the problem?

[trolltalk.com]

"01 must go to 10 before it can reach 11 and must got to 11 before it can be "flipped" to 00 again. All memory works on the same concept."

WTF? You sound like youy have a fine future ahead in law ... but not in computers. 01 can be flipped directly to 11 - each bit is stored in a separate junction. Or are you going to say that an 8-byte memory address has to be flipped repeatedly all the way to 11111111 before it can be reset to 00000000?

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

What were the results if you removed power from the memory as well as the refresh? I'm willing to bet a whole lot less favourable...

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a bad thing...

I remember a few years ago when I was first learning C. I fucked up memory allocation (in an int array) and the number 3140 was coming out as 3160. I might have missed this bug if I wasn't paying close attention to the output (and determined the output by hand).

Why I bring this up is because I don't trust unallocated memory, imagine this error with someone's IP address. And depending on several conditions, it is possible. Thus, this "evidence" does come with a shadow of doubt, and why I don't think it is a good idea to analyze RAM.

(You can point out that alloc'd RAM is fine, assuming that it wasn't uninitialized, but it would have to be analyzed very carefully by experts.)

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

Read the link

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_ del.html

It's not always true. And depends on the ram.

To bad moderators here don't actually follow links instead just mod down when enough people try to prove it wrong.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree, they demand the RAM, send it too them. After all, it's just a piece of hardware.

If the judge demands to know if they thought this was a joke, I'd say "Our response fulfilled the stated request by the judge, even though we thought his request was a joke, we went ahead with it just in case the joke is the requester..."

Bozos that don't understand technology should not preside over cases regarding it. (They need some techie judges...)

Re:What's the problem?

[jelle]

Please stop spreading blatant disinformation.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

No dear Judge Jacqueline Chooljian,

A document stored in RAM is not a tangible document.
A document stored in RAM is a volatile document.

Yes! It volatilizes!

If i power off the PC then ... no such volatile document exists.

Re:What's the problem?

[jelle]

If your board was still running, it was still accessing memory, causing refreshes as part of the access cycles...

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

if the bit is never flipped again the bit doesn't mysteriously drop to low again

There is no "mystery" involved. It is not a mechanical valve that flips. It is an electrical charge. When the charge is gone, there is no longer a value to read, memory chips and the gates that make them up are NOT superconductors, there is internal loses that will take the + voltage and eventually make it a 0 voltage. In theory, if you had the ability to count the remaining electrons in each gate area, you might be able to guess at what the previous state was before it ran out of power and deleted. Good luck doing that. Keep in mind, the method you use to get to and measure these electrons on each of these individual gates can not involve any type of actual connection because that would change the value of electrons there and make the whole process even more unreliable.

I can't believe I actually wasted my time writing this replay and trying to prove who jacked up you are.

Re:What's the problem?

[StarvingSE]

It doesn't matter how RAM works internally (I don't think it works the way you think it does, but I'm not an electrical engineer and it's kind of a moot point). The fact is that RAM must have an electrical charge to constantly refresh it's state or it loses all bit states, plain and simple. It's not like a hard drive where even though a file gets "deleted", the actual data can still be retrieved because it is only the entry in the file system that is deleted. Volitile memory holds absolutely no state without a power source.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

While the Judge is at it, why doesn't he just issue a subpoena, then instruct the Bailiff to download internets? It'd be just about as useful.

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

It is a bad example because it was short , what I was saying is it has to count up it ,can't go straight to 0. And that itself prevents the oxide outside from storing the content as another bit , unless it's left there for to long then obviously it gets damaged and falls to another value.

Re:What's the problem?

[tkrotchko]

This is a case of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".

This is the equivalent of judge saying air is evidence, since "the bad guys" used it to potentially say bad things. And he'd be right, except there is no known way to capture states of air; similarly there is no practical way to capture the changing states of RAM as he suggests.

Re:What's the problem?

[Hoi Polloi]

That is like saying since a suspect's face was reflected in a mirror at one point then the mirror constitutes an image recording.

Re:What's the problem?

[jollyreaper]

Take the chips out of the machine and send them to the other side. Yeah, you think it's funny. Just wait until the judge finds out that pulling the ram from the server erases the data previously stored on it. He'll slap "destruction of evidence" and "obstruction of justice" charges on these guys so fast their eyes will bleed.

Re:What's the problem?

[Chandon Seldon]

Or are you going to say that an 8-byte memory address has to be flipped repeatedly all the way to 11111111 before it can be reset to 00000000?

That design scales great. It'll take seconds to write a 32 bit memory address, and forever to write a 128 bit address.

Re:What's the problem?

[PhireN]

If you read it to check if its still there, then you have refreshed it.

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

Guess I expect to much of people to read links off of an article they obviously haven't seen before. Just keep modding them redundant because people are lazy. Great moderating.

7. Methods of Recovery for Data stored in Random-Access Memory
Contrary to conventional wisdom, "volatile" semiconductor memory does not entirely lose its contents when power is removed. Both static (SRAM) and dynamic (DRAM) memory retains some information on the data stored in it while power was still applied. SRAM is particularly susceptible to this problem, as storing the same data in it over a long period of time has the effect of altering the preferred power-up state to the state which was stored when power was removed. Older SRAM chips could often "remember" the previously held state for several days. In fact, it is possible to manufacture SRAM's which always have a certain state on power-up, but which can be overwritten later on - a kind of "writeable ROM".

DRAM can also "remember" the last stored state, but in a slightly different way. It isn't so much that the charge (in the sense of a voltage appearing across a capacitance) is retained by the RAM cells, but that the thin oxide which forms the storage capacitor dielectric is highly stressed by the applied field, or is not stressed by the field, so that the properties of the oxide change slightly depending on the state of the data. One thing that can cause a threshold shift in the RAM cells is ionic contamination of the cell(s) of interest, although such contamination is rarer now than it used to be because of robotic handling of the materials and because the purity of the chemicals used is greatly improved. However, even a perfect oxide is subject to having its properties changed by an applied field. When it comes to contaminants, sodium is the most common offender - it is found virtually everywhere, and is a fairly small (and therefore mobile) atom with a positive charge. In the presence of an electric field, it migrates towards the negative pole with a velocity which depends on temperature, the concentration of the sodium, the oxide quality, and the other impurities in the oxide such as dopants from the processing. If the electric field is zero and given enough time, this stress tends to dissipate eventually.

The stress on the cell is a cumulative effect, much like charging an RC circuit. If the data is applied for only a few milliseconds then there is very little "learning" of the cell, but if it is applied for hours then the cell will acquire a strong (relatively speaking) change in its threshold. The effects of the stress on the RAM cells can be measured using the built-in self test capabilities of the cells, which provide the ability to impress a weak voltage on a storage cell in order to measure its margin. Cells will show different margins depending on how much oxide stress has been present. Many DRAM's have undocumented test modes which allow some normal I/O pin to become the power supply for the RAM core when the special mode is active. These test modes are typically activated by running the RAM in a nonstandard configuration, so that a certain set of states which would not occur in a normally-functioning system has to be traversed to activate the mode. Manufacturers won't admit to such capabilities in their products because they don't want their customers using them and potentially rejecting devices which comply with their spec sheets, but have little margin beyond that.

A simple but somewhat destructive method to speed up the annihilation of stored bits in semiconductor memory is to heat it. Both DRAM's and SRAM's will lose their contents a lot more quickly at Tjunction = 140C than they will at room temperature. Several hours at this temperature with no power applied will clear their contents sufficiently to make recovery difficult. Conversely, to extend the life of stored bits with the power removed, the temperature should be dropped below -60C. Such cooling should lead to weeks, instead of hours or days, of data retention.

Re:What's the problem?

[Detritus]

The bank of memory that I was experimenting with had its own refresh controller. The address decoding logic prevented it from being refreshed by memory accesses to other banks of memory. The board's keyboard monitor software was running in a different bank of memory.

Re:What's the problem?

[Dancindan84]

I can already see it coming.

Judge, "The RAM you sent was erased! You're being held in contempt of court! Bailiff, take them away."

Re:What's the problem?

[broggyr]

It's a heluvan excuse to buy upgraded RAM...

Re:What's the problem?

[despe666]

Wanna bet they'll charge them with destruction of evidence if they actually comply with the order and pull the chips from the computer?

Re:What's the problem?

[harrkev]

If you read it to check if its still there, then you have refreshed it.

According to Heisenberg, the only way NOT to alter the DRAM is to NOT look at it. Reading the RAM will alter its contents. Isn't that the way it works ;)

Re:What's the problem?

[flitty]

I hereby order you to bring in your computer monitor, to see if we can recall any images that appeared in it, and get IP addresses that way!

Re:What's the problem?

[emurphy42]

You were apparently right about the link getting slashdotted. Nevertheless, while the theory (bit flips have a side effect on the physical material that can be detected with sufficient effort) is at least plausible, I don't think it leads to anything resembling a practical solution:

1. As previously noted, you'd have to wade through a huge hex dump
2. And you'd only get the data that was most recently in RAM; digging deeper, if possible at all (I know it is for hard drives), would be even more expensive
3. And why would the **AA spend all this money, when they can (as I believe they have) just have the court order TorrentSpy to log the relevant info to disk? The government digs deep into a hard drive when it has to, e.g. they reasonably expect to find useful info re a planned terrorist attack

Re:What's the problem?

[jacksonj04]

Trouble is, each junction is separate and only counts to one before flipping over. 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 0

01 to 00 is easy, just flip the second junction to a 0.

Re:What's the problem?

[Chicken04GTO]

Youre an idiot. Stop posting. The 1's decay, quickly. Without power, the RAM soon becomes all zeros.

Re:What's the problem?

[apparently]

but why did the judge specifically reference RAM, and not just say "hey dipshit, turn on logging"?

Re:What's the problem?

[rs79]

Attention dipshits: learn to read.

From the first line of TFA:
In a decision reported late Friday by CNET News.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles found (PDF) that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

Note the "can be stored" bit.

If you'd read the PDF of the court order you'd have noted the judge understands quite well that the RAM is volotile and that he was asking the relevant parts be stored. Specifically, he wants the ip addresses stored.

The story headline should have read "judge orders torrentspy to store IP addresses".

Re:What's the problem?

[BosstonesOwn]

Not whining , proving my point. Arguing with facts and findings instead of ignorance. Helps you to excercise your mind when you do that.

Re:What's the problem?

[norminator]

No, as the GPP stated, each bit is held separately, each bit can be changed independently of the others. In your example, 01 is two bits. The only "counting up" that happens is that each bit goes from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. Even if all of the bits did have to count up together (can you imagine how long it would take to subtract 1 from a number in a 32-bit memory location in a scheme like that?) that still doesn't have anything to do with what state the oxide holds.

Re:What's the problem?

[Orange Crush]

. . . and even if there was or might be some future invention making it possible, just run memtest and overwrite it all with garbage.

Re:What's the problem?

[Doctor Memory]

Remind me not to have contact with you....

Re:What's the problem?

[Loconut1389]

Obviously the judge doesn't understand. Say you could keep a log of every change to the ram since powerup- eg initial state all zeroes, address 1234 changes to 0xAA, address 1235 changes to 0x55, and so on until power off.. The data is still without context- without knowing precisely what was running and what the instruction pointers were and what the cpu registers were and all that for every single change to the ram, it would be impossible to figure out what was truly in the ram.

If the judge wants the servers to log every ip address it comes in contact with, then that would be addressed in the kernel/tcp stack of the OS, not the hardware. Coming up with a neighbor chip to the ram that logs all that would be impossible (to do with context).

Re:What's the problem?

[cyphercell]

Hello?!!?? Jackass, learn to read a thread.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238463&thr eshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=19509013

Re:What's the problem?

[lawpoop]

The question I have is, how feasible is it to log all IP addresses from the RAM and associate them with the transactions in question? I don't know, maybe they could just keep their apache logs?

Re:What's the problem?

[robbiethefett]

you could simply explain to the judge that the wizards who live in the magic machine box have cast a very powerful spell that makes it extremely difficult to get the RAM out. i mean, it's pretty apparent that this judge would take that as a reasonable explanation.

Re:What's the problem?

[canajin56]

There are established rules that say that a defendant cannot be compelled to create new documents for the plaintiff, even if the new document would just be a compilation and/or summary of other documents. TorrentSpy maintains that they do not currently log IP addresses, and therefore an order to begin logging IP addresses and turn over their logs would be illegal. The judge has ruled that RAM is legally a document, and therefore they DO in fact have such documents in their possession, if for a very short period of time. As such, he has stated that a requirement to enable logging does not constitute creating a new document, and is simply transcribing a document from one format to another, which they CAN be required to do. And that's why he referenced the RAM, because without acknowledging that this data is contained in the RAM "document" at one point, they cannot be legally compelled to enable logging.

Re:What's the problem?

[cyphercell]

Can't read your link, but I'm assuming your talking about NVRAM, or NAND flash RAM and this stuff is hardly common-place.

Re:What's the problem?

[pentalive]

So, now does that mean that TorrentSpy must re-write their software to write out the RAM at the oportune moment? Possibly "breaking" the software so it no longer works at all? What if TorrentSpy just packs up bags and closes? Perhaps the addition of the functionality is un-doable, adding the code to save the RAM introduces too much overhead for the program to work.

Re:What's the problem?

[geekboy642]

Your post is correct only so long as the power line is going through. At the most basic level, RAM is nothing more than a bistable vibrator. They require +V to maintain state. There are, of course, other forms of memory(i.e. flash drives, etc), but the RAM in a commodity-parts server would only use the normal kind. Unplug a server's RAM and the data is gone better than even the NSA can recover.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is entry level (freshman year) computer science stuff that you are getting completely wrong. Why are you doing this? It seems your goal is to torment as many /. readers as possible.

Re:What's the problem?

[UbuntuDupe]

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basicly a capacitor.

Yeah, but isn't this entire case really just about a bunch of ones and zeros? ;-)

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take the chips out of the machine and send them to the other side.

Once you've taken the chips out, hold them while you shuffle across a nylon rug, then use the DIMMS to discharge the built-up static to a doorknob or to a cold water faucet.

Then microwave to desired doneness.

Re:What's the problem?

[Trigun]

Or loan him RAM. Or anything else, for that matter.

Re:What's the problem?

[jelle]

"The bank of memory that I was experimenting with had its own refresh controller. The address decoding logic prevented it from being refreshed by memory accesses to other banks of memory. The board's keyboard monitor software was running in a different bank of memory."

That doesn't matter. A read or write to a row of DRAM has a side-effect: it refreshes the line...

You can actually stop doing DRAM refresh cycles alltogether, and as long as you access each DRAM row before the refresh time is exceeded, the data will be guaranteed equally stable as it is with refresh enabled.

Re:What's the problem?

[databyss]

Fear not, none of that is in ram any longer. The Bosstones guy doesn't understand what he's talking about. Once you power down, the data is gone. There is no way to recover the data.

Re:What's the problem?

[AK Marc]

It is illegal to demand a document be created. The judge declared that the IP logs did exist at some time, even if only in RAM, so they must be produced. Not capturing the contents of RAM before it changes is destruction of documents. The only way around this would be a literal interpretation of the details, such as producing the contents of all RAM, without context. Just the strings of 1s and 0s, as that is how the "document" is stored in RAM. The implication is that the raw contents of RAM will not be produced, but instead the data that they are seeking will be distilled from the RAM and formed into a standard file. Such additional work is not necessary and it is illegal for the judge to demand. It is akin to the judge ordering you to present your address book because it contains the number of your bookie and holding you in contempt because in addition to the "b"s (where everyone lists Bookie under "b"), you included the As, Cs, Ds, etc. You *may* do the additional work, but there is never a legal requirement. If they don't like it, they can sift through the data themselves. If they didn't want the contents of the RAM, they shouldn't have subpoenaed it.

Re:What's the problem?

[john_is_war]

More like 10ms

Re:What's the problem?

[shmlco]

Oh please. 34.56.231.23 has made a request for seed 4e4564e443ed34a33.

You know that, or you could not fulfill the request. Now log it.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

to such a moronic order, the answer can only be equally moronic

cat /dev/random > /new_50000_terabytes_storage_array_paid_for_by_mpa a/memory_trace_file.log &

that's the memory dump and trace of our servers, honest! :]

Re:What's the problem?

[Yvanhoe]

And here again we hit this known wall : the law language is full of ambiguity. From a technical point of view, considering a RAM as a recording is a nonsense for me, but yes, the information is available at the time. But one could argue this is a recording while another could say it is a verbal information.

I consider it normal that the law says what should be logged by a process for this process to be legal but I consider that using interpretation of old laws talking about (paper) recordings and agreements to apply them in the realm of electronic data and network transaction is soothsaying at best.

Re:What's the problem?

[ehrichweiss]

Seconded. Though one has to wonder how the plaintiff doesn't see this coming.

Re:What's the problem?

[Joe Snipe]

Heluvan excuse (hlvn), noun; colloquialism, slang

1. Any attempt to justify or obtain forgiveness by blaming others.

2. A reference to Steve Heluvan; known for coining the phrase "They made me do it."

other examples of modern colloquialisms include 'allen wrench', 'pulling a homer', and 'jack off'.

Re:What's the problem?

[PopeRatzo]

After about ten seconds without power, I doubt any instrument would be able to read the state before power down.

Let's stop screwing around here. The real "non-volatile" memory is the one that's sitting between your ears, and don't think for a second that your own memory will become the ultimate battleground in this debate.

After all, the core issue of all Intellectual Property (the very name implies something extremely scary) is that ideas, creativity, meaning itself are fungible and mercantile.

I can laugh at my own ability to follow this thinking into conspiracy theory-land, but that still doesn't make me any more comfortable with the implications of the twisted offspring of a misguided intellectual property system, a litigious culture, and raw greed. We're seeing an erosion of privacy, yes, but nothing like what's coming. The ultimate loss of privacy (and indeed individuality itself) will not happen gradually, but in a flash. And there will be no turning back.

Re:What's the problem?

[uncledrax]

What? you mean you -dont- use NVRam? ....All the cool kids are doing it in thier servers..

Re:What's the problem?

[HermMunster]

Lol, that's ludicrous. RAM outside the machine. Just incredulous. Anyway, torrentspy is not in the US so the US courts have little jurisdiction over them.

Re:What's the problem?

[Eternauta3k]

omg lies
in regular ram bits are stored in capacitors, which need refreshing. If you power it off, they lose their charge and you won't find it easy to read them (what are you gonna do, open the chips?)

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

assuming there's no mechanism already in place to log ip addresses, can torrentspy be compelled to write programs to accomplish this? and, what kind of precedence does this set for any kind of service provider that uses a computer?

It's past history. Hardware manufacturers have already been required to include wiretap functionality and accessibility in their wares to comply with CALEA requests (hah! -- DEMANDS) and to provide hooks for Omnivore (substitute name of current incarnation) at your local ISP.

Yawn, just another unfunded mandate from your government, designed to externalize the costs of enslaving you.

Re:What's the problem?

[ehrichweiss]

"The question I have is, how feasible is it to log all IP addresses from the RAM and associate them with the transactions in question?"

I would guess that depends on how much RAM they have, how many transactions they get an hour and the amount of data necessary for each transaction. Seeing as how mysql is going to eat a ton per transaction, I don't think they're going to get nearly as much as they'd like even with rather large amounts of memory.

Re:What's the problem?

[leenks]

Why on earth was this moderated troll?

Re:What's the problem?

[spideysense]

He's talking about reading Ox hides to get information - What's next? Casting chicken bones, or reading tea leaves? Oh, OXIDES - never mind, he's not a troll.

Re:What's the problem?

[jrumney]

The problem is when they get charged with contempt of court for wiping the data from the RAM before handing it over.

Re:What's the problem?

[mako1138]

Google cache:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:PxTwoO6oZzMJ:w ww.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html +http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure _del.html&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox- a

Note that this paper is from 1996, is from a symposium, and deals mainly with magnetic media. There are absolutely no citations in the part that talks about solid-state memory (lots of cites in the magnetic part though), so I am skeptical. If it could be done, he could have easily presented proof.

And now it's been ten years, with device area getting cut in half just about every two years. In modern DRAM, the charge storage is so minute that any accumulated oxide stress effects would be lost in the noise.

(While I'm at it, 00 -> 01 -> 10 -> 11, WTF?)

Re:What's the problem?

[ZWarrior]

A better headline would read " Judge Orders TorrentSpy to Turn Over RAM dump" That would have made a lot more sense, and keep the kneejerks to a minimum.

Re:What's the problem?

[Lehk228]

i suspect 10 milliseconds would be enough, considering timing is in nanoseconds, and i doubt the reading circuitry on the RAM would even let you try to read the chip after the power was cut, i'm not certain but as soon as you power it up again all the "near zero" ones would get rewritten as zero since the refresh cycle would see them as zero now.

Re:What's the problem?

[calgar99]

He's lived all his life in a train station. Ever see one of the Grand Central Station boards flip ALL the way through the destinations before resetting itself back to nothing? I used to think that was so cool... -Matt

Re:What's the problem?

[Lehk228]

actually SDRAM "clears" itself many times every second, which is why it needs to be constantly refreshed. old SRAM chips do not and could be read, but nobody uses SRAM in computers nowadays, just small very low power applications

Re:What's the problem?

[Alien54]

Actually, send them the boxes with the ram installed. Minus the drives. or with new empty 2 gig drives. and point out how you did not merely comply with the order, but you went beyond the call of duty in complying with the order.

Be sure to have a proper forensic quality image file of the original drive sets for when the judge figures out that they were being stupid, and has a expect ask for the actual thing they need.

of course you could also disable the original hard drives, and send them just the original naked platters. Be sure to handle with clean room gloves, so that only the opposition's or the judge's finger prints are on the disks. [smile]

Re:What's the problem?

[oskay]

I follow you most of the way, but I'm not sure how arsenic, cesium, and darmstadtium fit into this discussion.

Re:What's the problem?

[UncleTogie]

Why on earth was this moderated troll?
Maybe 'cause there's a difference 'tween the oxides on a hard drive platter and the silicon used in memory?

Volatile memory != magnetic-oxide-based platter storage.

Re:What's the problem?

[calgar99]

The Judge has ordered that since, even though there is no logging, the IPs are available in the RAM for a period of time, that constitutes a recording and they were ordered to capture that information from the RAM in a more permanent spot. I don't understand something. If this is correct, it sounds like the judge is asking for TorrentSpy to go back in time and give him the data log, since it could have been done (and obviously is too late to do now). Or, that TorrentSpy is in the wrong for not collecting the data in the first place? Someone please help me out!

Re:What's the problem?

[sowth]

Because the guy is making up bullshit. It is obvious to anyone who knows anything about electronics or computers. DRAM is made up of capacitors which do store charge, but it leaks away in a matter of seconds or minutes based on the quality and size of capacitor. SRAM is made up of transisters and loses all its state as soon as power is lost.Neither one of these would retain any data whatsoever without power after even a small amount of time, say 15 minutes.

There is flash memory, but no one will use it as RAM because it goes bad after only a few thousand state changes--would probably only last a few seconds on a modern computer. There are also magnetic forms of memory used in chips, but from what I understand it is still experimental and bulky, though it was used in some ancient computers (before the days of microchips).

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a bad example because it was short , what I was saying is it has to count up it ,can't go straight to 0. And that itself prevents the oxide outside from storing the content as another bit , unless it's left there for to long then obviously it gets damaged and falls to another value.

Dear idiot child, we're talking about semiconductor devices -- not one of those little handheld clickers they use for counting people going ino a building. And even those can have all digits reset to zero without wearing out your knuckles (which in your case get enough wear and tear from dragging on the ground).

Re:What's the problem?

[leenks]

And you've read the documents linked in other posts (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure _del.html etc) and debunked the claims? do you have documents to the contrary you can share?

Re:What's the problem?

[hAckz0r]

Believe it or not, they can read a ram chip after a power down. Of course if you keep the chip below -60C its state stays stronger and longer, but there is equipment that is capable of reading those chips if 'National Security' is at stake. However I doubt the RIAA has the time, money, knowlege, and patients to do this and you can't just run out and buy the machine at the local computer store either. And we all know the RIAA will just put some "expert" on the stand that once apon a time saw one of those forensic chip reading machines in some lab one day and they now say though his expert opinion is there was a copyright violation on that chip. They could not pay me enough...

Re:What's the problem?

[pipatron]

Your assumptions are wrong - the paper specifically talks about SRAM and DRAM.

Re:What's the problem?

[Kiralan]

I would be VERY impressed by whomever could write a program that could be executed without altering any RAM (can't alter what you are trying to capture, after all) , assuming a Windows platform. In short, not possible. The only way I can visualize, is to literally stop the processors clocks, while leaving the refresh clocks operational. Then, a ICE (In-circuit emulator) could be attached in place of /atop the CPU bus, and possibly walked through the addresses, and store to another device. Of course, this would all have to be done at the time of the supposed violation, and with expert (and repeatable, I suspect) forensic techniques used. Maybe the NSA has the hardware and expertise available, but doubtful it could be done otherwise. Beyond that of course, is determining what data is relevant, and verifiably connecting it to the application. (Have the source code to Windows, BitTorrent, etc. as needed, do you?)

Re:What's the problem?

[dberstein]

Wouldn't it be better evidence to request the attached speakers? Perhaps some expert witness can find traces of the stolen music ;)

Re:What's the problem?

[An Onerous Coward]

But if the RAM *is* the document, then the records exist, and every use of the free() system call is effectively the same as running your documents through the shredder.

Nah, a lawyer would never be so brazen as to make an argument like that. Wait, yes they would.

Re:What's the problem?

[Randseed]

Well, it's simple, then. Convert the contents of the RAM to literally a string of '1's and '0's, then print them out on a laser printer in a variable-spaced font with no landmarks. Then turn over the 100,000 pages of single-spaced 1s and 0s, and the variable spaced font ensures that they have to count the individual characters.

Re:What's the problem?

[Jon_S]

But...

This RAM goes to 11!

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, so under that logic they should give them a transcription of the entire systems ram at say, 100 transcriptions per second...? Granted, they'll probably miss some transactions at even that rate though. That would pretty much bury the prosecution in useless paperwork... :) Searching said ram for specific ip addresses would involve a compilation and/or summary of the entire system ram "document" which they are not compelled to do, so they're only compelled to give a transcription of the entire system ram.

Re:What's the problem?

[Tim C]

No, as that's not what was ordered. The order was to start logging the information so that it can be submitted as evidence in the future, not to hand over the RAM chips themselves.

Re:What's the problem?

[KronicD]

Seriously, its there. Search the document for DRAM :P (Or just read the whole thing)

Re:What's the problem?

[DigiShaman]

There are also magnetic forms of memory used in chips, but from what I understand it is still experimental and bulky, though it was used in some ancient computers (before the days of microchips).

It's called Core Memory. There's a nice Wiki article about the stuff.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrentspy was contending that they had no record of user's IP addresses, since they don't do any IP logging. The Judge has ordered that since, even though there is no logging, the IPs are available in the RAM for a period of time, that constitutes a recording and they were ordered to capture that information from the RAM in a more permanent spot.

What a novel idea. Applied to cannibals and apple thievs, she could order them to bag their turds as evidence, before they've even become turds. American law has become such a novelty sport in recent years.

Re:What's the problem?

[cdrom600]

As I understand, RAM is essentially a ton of tiny capacitors. If they're charged, they're ones. Otherwise, they're zeros. The charge goes away pretty much instantly after you take away power.
The court won't find anything in any RAM the plaintiff turns in.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

...RAM is 'volotile'? You need to learn how to spell, DIPSHIT.

Re:What's the problem?

[MoFoQ]

well they can't really...since the original order will inevitably lead to violating the law no matter what; some what of a Catch-22/entrapment.
Following the order requires the separation of the RAM from the computer which destroys the data.

anyways, as far as logging, that's also very difficult to do. Lets say that 25% of the operations of a given computer are to manipulating memory and that the clock of this hypothetical computer is 1 billion cycles per second. So that means 250 million bytes per second, which in turn is already beyond the performance ability of hard drive storage devices. That's 21.6 trillion bytes per day. Plus how long do you have to retain the data?
This doesn't include things that happen in various buffers and caches (L1/L2, etc.) nor the fact that the mere act of writing to the hard drive changes information in memory. (and yes, 1GHz is pretty low and a single core, etc.)

I could have sworn there was a law that requires judicial orders to be grounded in the realm of reality.
But then again.....

Re:What's the problem?

[prat393]

You know... I used to know something, but my brain was designed by an evolutionary process that found it aids it recall to actively suppress conflicting memories, so I forgot it.

Can I charge evolution with destruction of evidence? Why not subpoena people's memories? Or require them to write everything down?

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

DRAM is made up of capacitors which do store charge, but it leaks away in a matter of seconds or minutes based on the quality and size of capacitor. SRAM is made up of transisters

transvestite sisters?

Re:What's the problem?

[Vancorps]

Last I checked document destruction was perfectly legal as long as it was a stated policy ahead of time and that it was followed consistently. At least this is what the lawyers told me the other day while I was discussing our document retention policy. Makes me wonder how the hell the judge thinks she can order this policy changed. The whole purpose for not logging IP addresses is to avoid this mess to begin with. Combine that with huge storage requirements, hell my web logs are in the terabytes already over the course of a year. I can't imagine having to retain them longer. I do this for webtrends analysis although it does open me up to this whole mess as well. Fortunately my website doesn't host any content that isn't owned by us.

I think they should definitely do what IBM did and just print a memory dump from noon and a dump from 8pm, and a dump from midnight. That should be sufficient to make the point clear that this is absurd.

Re:What's the problem?

[marcansoft]

I ported Linux to a DSL router once. While loading the image, I noticed that the "before" ram hexdump produced by the bootloader was the same as the "after" hexdump. I thought at first that something had gone wrong. Turns out the data was correct - the "before" data was from last boot (yes, this included a physical turn off / on cycle, that lasted at least 5-10 seconds).

RAM does hold data for a while. There's a difference between holding ALL data perfectly (which is why RAM is refreshed many times per second), and being able to retrieve most data. It'll probably work within a few seconds using the RAM chip's internal reading machinery (for most of the data), and using special equipment you could recover it after a while. It won't last a day, but data in RAM isn't gone a split second after power-off.

Re:What's the problem?

[Xyrus]

Make the log, copyright it, and then forbid its distribution.

~X~

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are close but still not right. The judge understood the company wasn't saving server logs, but argued the info in RAM was the equivalent of server logs and should be saved as part of discovery. HOWEVER, the judge explicitly said NOT to log IP addresses, since Torrentspy had promised users it would not.

She wrote: "To the extent defendants' privacy policy may prohibit the disclosure of IP addresses, compliance with this order does not violate such policy because IP addresses are to be masked."

Learn more here: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/06/torrentsp y_case.html

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, but the wanted information is the one off the RAM itself.

To prove that TorrentSpy was making it easier to share files, the studios told Chooljian that it was necessary that they obtain records of user activity. They convinced her that the only way to do this was to obtain the data from RAM.

It also shows that the judge doesn't understand technology and blindly follows the lead of MPAA which suggested getting the data off the RAM. It's the case of the blind following another blind.

I suggest TorrentSpy create a memory dump off the RAM and give the printout to the judge. Since the data keeps changing, they can also ask the judge when they need to do another memory dump.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the original post is accurate smartass. Now why your post moderated up is beyond explanation (well, no it isn't, Slashdot is full of knowitall morons).

A little reading for you (or just search for oxide in the text ya lazy punk):

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_ del.html

Re:What's the problem?

[aichpvee]

Why not, most americans think that's how the universe was created. So it only makes sense that computers run on magic, too.

Re:What's the problem?

[napkin1]

So, since RAM is constantly refreshed and possibly changed on each one, how often are they supposed to do a memory dump?

If you count a refresh as a change to memory, then thats a heck of a lot of hard drive space. Lets say 2GB of RAM, 7ns refresh, and say 1 hour. So: 1,000,000,000ns = 1s*60s/m *60m/h ~514,000,000,000refreshes/hour * 2GB = 1,028,000,000,000 GB/hour.
Not really feasible. Obviously you would want to track the delta instead, but how would you without capturing a full dump on every access?

Re:What's the problem?

[Lost Engineer]

Yeah it says that only data which stays the same for a long time in DRAM is recoverable and then only for hours, unless you keep it very cold, in which case it might last a few weeks.

Let's hope the torrent people won't be sending it liquid nitrogen wrapped.

Re:What's the problem?

[mako1138]

I wrote: "There are absolutely no citations in the part that talks about solid-state memory (lots of cites in the magnetic part though), so I am skeptical. If it could be done, he could have easily presented proof."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_(electron ics)

Re:What's the problem?

[complete loony]

Worse, this sets a very bad precedent. Imagine this ruling being applied to a router at your ISP. All traffic that passes through a router will at some point hit a memory register, even if it is only within a network card. Thus the ISP has a document they could produce in discovery so long as they stop destroying it and record it somewhere permanently. Allowing any kind of wiretapping in a civil case.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure no problem your honor, here is the core dump.

What's that? You want me to interpret it for you?

Damn it Jim, I'm a web master, not a doctorate in systems engineering!

Re:What's the problem?

[AK Marc]

Last I checked document destruction was perfectly legal as long as it was a stated policy ahead of time and that it was followed consistently. At least this is what the lawyers told me the other day while I was discussing our document retention policy.

That is a fine and legal policy. However, that policy is illegal once legal proceedings have begun and you are notified to no longer destroy documents. Specifically, in this case (as in yours) the judge can't fine them or find them in contempt for wiping their RAM as a regular procedure. However, like in your case, if a judge orders you to no longer destroy documents related to something, that order trumps your policy.

Re:What's the problem?

[sjames]

What is the ruling on requiring a defendant to take unusual steps to preserve or restore deteriorating documents?

In other words, hand the court the physical RAM and point out all the data was there but the medium decays very quickly. The court is free to examine the chips for whatever may remain.

Alternatively, since the court may NOT compel a summary of the existing RAM "document", just append /dev/mem to a logfile repeatedly (that is, an exact copy of the "document") and turn that in.

Re:What's the problem?

[Mr2cents]

if you put "cat /dev/mem | uuencode | mail judge@court.gov" in a cronjob and let it run every minute, I'm sure he will be more than pleased.

Re:What's the problem?

[xipietotec]

The judges decision appears to be based on the fact that you can simply enable logging in the server software. If this stands up, which I'm optimistic that it won't, there's still another loophole you can use: Create a webserver software which has no option to log ip addresses. Then in order to create IP logs you would have to actually install another program to do so, and that *does* constitute creation of documents.

Re:What's the problem?

[etherlad]

Attention dipshits: learn to read.

You must be new to Slashdot!

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, all zeroed out. "But your honour, I put them in any machine, turn it on, and everything works fine. So, just because the other side can't find anything but zeroes indicates that that is the true contents of RAM, your honour. Just a bunch of random ones and zeros. Seems like magic, doesn't it, your Honour?"

EGADS! It IS magic! :-)

With enough gold, your honour, I can probably do an incantation to find the contents to be anything you wish, your honour...:-)
Which witch do you want to burn...I mean, which defendent do you want to send to jail, your computer-illiterate your Honouredness?

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I haven't heard of any theory on how the universe was created that doesn't end up with something that just existed magically in the beginning. I don't think anything has ever explained the very start of the beginning without doing that. I don't think you could either.

And strange, the (k)captcha I have to type to post says moron. I'm wondering it slashdot somehow knew?

Re:What's the problem?

[SteveAyre]

You're assuming that there actually was a beginning, and that's not just something us mortal humans have ingrained into our being. :o)

(Not talking about the current universe starting with the big bang, I mean no beginning to whatever existed for the big bang to happen to/from/in).

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I haven't heard of any theory on how the universe was created that doesn't end up with something that just existed magically in the beginning.

It's a leap of faith to assume that the Universe was "created" at all.

Re:What's the problem?

[teeters]

A touch of White-Out would fix that!

Re:What's the problem?

[cafucu]

All trolls go to hell.

Re:What's the problem?

[necrodeep]

That assumes 1: you could find a storage medium that large that could 2: actually accept data being written to it at that speed.

Assuming you could find that... i suggest you hand it over to me, because I would really like to get my hands on it. :)

Re:What's the problem?

[Hal_Porter]

Are you kidding? At this point, turning the machine off or in anyway disconnecting the power from the RAM is effectively destruction of evidence, contempt of court and a whole bunch of things which are serious crimes. No one likes a smartarse and judges have a whole arsenal of legal weapons to use against them.

Re:What's the problem?

[dbIII]

However the judge is talking about dumping memory to a file while the machine is on in the hope that some evidence may still remain - so appears to be well advised and not clueless.

Re:What's the problem?

[ThePengwin]

so by turning off the PC they can say you are effectively destroying documents?

Re:What's the problem?

[dizzydogg]

Yes that link says you can read the stress on the oxides surrounding the capacitors in the ram using special test modes, but you should read that last line: if it's cooled it can last weeks INSTEAD OF HOURS, so it would only last a few hours unless specialy preserved. Also ,that article is over 11 years old, the capacitors and the methods of making them have changed since then.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take them out and mail them in! Sure I'll mail my RAM chips in! This reminds me of the story I read about police in India confiscating monitors of suspected pirates and kiddie-porn sites. The police would seize the monitors, leaving CPUs and other non-essential items behind (CD/DVD/floppy/USB stick, etc). After the cops left, the cleanup began and in haste. Guess who was red faced on court day? Still, this shows in a mighty clear way just exactly how stupid these people are. Massive stupidity. Huge legal sticks, sure, but brainless just the same.

Re:What's the problem?

[KronicD]

Wow, It looks like I fail at reading :P

Re:What's the problem?

[phantomcircuit]

See that seems funny but that would probably be torrentspy's best defense.

The judge has ordered that the contents of RAM be handed over as they constitute stored documents.

The problem with his order is that the contents of ram would make almost no sense in a raw dump AND the defendant cannot be compelled to summarize the information for the plantiff AND they might be able to provide just the portions of memory which contain the IP address' which would make it even more difficult to reconstruct the IP addresses in a readable fashion.

Re:What's the problem?

[kylehase]

If RAM is a document, does that mean when my PC overwrites some of the RAM, I'm destroying said documents?

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be interested to see the effect of this ruling in the context that a law like the one passed in Germany banning "hacker tools" is also passed in the United States. Undoubtedly, a RAM profiling tool could be considered a "hacker tool". If that is the case, how can a court expect someone to actually go about storing the data that would be subsequently turned over to the court?

In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re:What's the problem?

[cyphercell]

One thing that can cause a threshold shift in the RAM cells is ionic contamination of the cell(s) of interest, although such contamination is rarer now than it used to be because of robotic handling of the materials and because the purity of the chemicals used is greatly improved.

I'm very impressed, but after reading the above sentence it occurred to me that purity levels and moore's law are directly related to one another, and this paper was written in '96. It seems that the better DRAM gets, the more difficult it will be to extract data from it.

However, even a perfect oxide is subject to having its properties changed by an applied field. When it comes to contaminants, sodium is the most common offender - it is found virtually everywhere, and is a fairly small (and therefore mobile) atom with a positive charge. In the presence of an electric field, it migrates towards the negative pole with a velocity which depends on temperature, the concentration of the sodium, the oxide quality, and the other impurities in the oxide such as dopants from the processing. If the electric field is zero and given enough time, this stress tends to dissipate eventually.

Now if someone with better chemistry than can describe to me that things are still this way then I will bite, but at this point I'm assuming those thin little sodium atoms slip out of place rather quickly. After that I'd still have some reservations about the sheer number of little sodium balls you'd be counting. You'd need a fairly specialized machine to actually extract that data.

Re:What's the problem?

[Fordiman]

"Ultimately, pulling user information off a server's RAM might be a bigger privacy problem than it's worth, said one file sharer, who asked to remain anonymous."

Not to mention that it's actually impossible. Anything the MPAA wants off the server's RAM has already been overwritten. This is actually the most retarded court decision I've heard of in a long time.

Re:What's the problem?

[fyngyrz]

The only way I can think of to get the contents of RAM chips out is to use acid to dissolve the epoxy cases, snip the little gold wires, then veeewwy veeeewwy carefully pry the silicon off the metal base.

Then you could scrape the chips until the doped silicon, metallization and insulating deposits they contained were out, and then send that along to the judge. I'm sure she wouldn't be interested in the substrate; after all, it never held any data.

I love being ruled by morons, I really do.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion this is a judge playing lawyer's games, but from the bench. He's made his mind up in one direction and given a ruling, then had a solid legal argument presented to him that shows that his ruling isn't legal. Now he's squirming to find a theory of why it is, and, being the judge, until and unless it goes to appeal, he only needs to convince himself. That he's doing so doesn't bode well for whatever response TorrentSpy come up with, but their confidence on being able to appeal him must be over the roof.

Re:What's the problem?

[syousef]

Attention dipshits: learn to read

You must be a lawyer. You're attempting to get the attention of people who aren't able to read, and you're doing it in writing.

Re:What's the problem?

[bitbucketeer]

Here's the problem: Copying the entire contents of memory at every memory cycle would generate a simply HUGE amount of data. And it would all be meaningless without a record of the CPU registers and the instruction that was being executed at the time. I say print it all out and dump everything on the MPAA that they got the judge to order because they'll *never* be able to figure anything out that they can conclusively prove!

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Useless use of cat :-(

</dev/mem uuencode | mail judge@court.gov

Re:What's the problem?

[gevantry]

Hmmm. Something tells me this judge believes in the ghost in the machine.

Re:What's the problem?

[simm1701]

The big bang was jump started by Lister using the jump leads from star bug

You've seen back to reality right? ;)

Re:What's the problem?

[BlueTrin]

That's easy since it would be too slow to store it in real-time on a hard drive, store it in another RAM ... problem solved !

Re:What's the problem?

[BlueTrin]

Hansel: "We got 30 years of files right here in this computer that are gonna bring you down! "
Matilda: "Oh, no."
Hansel: "Down! (He smashes the computer) Where did all the files go?"

Re:What's the problem?

[GreyPoopon]

you could simply explain to the judge that the wizards who live in the magic machine box have cast a very powerful spell that makes it extremely difficult to get the RAM out.

As funny as this is, the problem is that most judges have a sense of humor that is directly proportional to their understanding of the subject matter. In other words, if the judge is confused, he's not likely to find anything funny about it (even if the rest of us do).

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

filtering on slashdot scores is equivalent to having a fat ugly stupid loser nerd selectively read you the newspaper from his mom's basement.

Hahaha, good one. And to whoever modded him down, yes, that's you.
BTW, GGGP really is nonsense.

Re:What's the problem?

[rachit]

In a decision reported late Friday by CNET News.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles found (PDF) that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit. In other news, federal judge in Los Angeles found that the compression waves in the air of a board room, or sound, is a tangible record that can be stored (using a microphone) and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

Re:What's the problem?

[Cruise_WD]

Errr. "Insightful"!? Red Dwarf = comedy. Comment = funny.

Sheesh - /. Moderators think Red Dwarf is real, and we're surprised when a judge asks someone to hand over their RAM?

Re:What's the problem?

[simm1701]

Oh it gets worse - even if you took the assumption that red dwarf was real, that particular scene occurred during an hallucination caused by the despair squid!!

Re:What's the problem?

[Weezul]

Yes, it sounds like the judge is over reaching. TorrentSpy needs to appeal.

Re:What's the problem?

[Wobble-U]

Crazy! I watched that very episode just a few hours ago! I liked it :)

Re:What's the problem?

[neersign]

Somebody must've told him the files are IN the computer. Maybe it was Hansel, he's so hot right now.

Re:What's the problem?

[tinkerghost]

The judges decision appears to be based on the fact that you can simply enable logging in the server software. If this stands up, which I'm optimistic that it won't, there's still another loophole you can use: Create a webserver software which has no option to log ip addresses. Then in order to create IP logs you would have to actually install another program to do so, and that *does* constitute creation of documents.

It doesn't work that way. The judge order is a step back 1 level from the implimentation & relies on the architecture & protocol. The IP addresses & requests are nessesary for the protocols to funtion properly. The software - and consequently RAM - must have those pieces of information in order to process the requests. The ruling states that the document in question is the IP/Request information stored in RAM. How you choose to transcribe it is up too you, but the court order is for the data stored in RAM.

As an order, it is technically sound and prevents the kind of jimmying most people are talking about. The problem is it's built on the wrong premis. For this ruling, the judge appears to be examining ram as analogous to a paper document. The problem is it's more closely related to speech. A document by it's nature has permanence with a requirement that it be avtively destroyed. Speech & ram are both ephemeral & have a requirement that they be actively recorded in order to achieve permanence.

As pointed out by someone else, if this stands, we don't have to worry about whether AT&T giving the NSA copies of data from their switches is illegal, because this ruling makes the copies in ram a 'document' belonging to AT&T with which they can do as they please. Since almost all of the phone traffic in the US now routes through packet switching systems, AT&T can now tape your calls as they run through the switch & post them to Utube, give them to the NSA, or sell them back to you - all under the grace of 'RAM is a document'.

Re:What's the problem?

[mdwh2]

Well, I haven't heard of any theory on how the universe was created that doesn't end up with something that just existed magically in the beginning.

There's a difference between "we don't know how it happened" and believing "it happened by magic". No theory of the universe says anything happened by magic - rather, it's that we don't have a theory that explains everything yet.

In this context, it's the difference between not knowing how a computer works, and believing it runs by magic.

Re:What's the problem?

[tinkerghost]

And why would the **AA spend all this money, when they can (as I believe they have) just have the court order TorrentSpy to log the relevant info to disk? The government digs deep into a hard drive when it has to, e.g. they reasonably expect to find useful info re a planned terrorist attack

Because the court cannot compel anyone to create a new document in order to produce it in discovery. They can however compel you to transcribe it to another format. If I only keep my data in a propietary binary format that is only readable on my home system, I can be required to reformat the document to a pdf/txt/office/printout/whatever and present the transcribed document.

This judges ruling is definately crafted to work around this fact. By defining RAM as a document, the court can require that it be transcribed & turned over. The issue hinges on if RAM is in fact a document* or not. I checked about 6 law dictionaries, and only 2 of them had any definition for 'document'. The first definition precludes this interpretation as it requires permanence. The 2nd definition might be able to be stretched to fit, but it's a rough go without starting to require conversations to be recorded & prevent people from recording & using anything that happens to touch their computer.

*This legal dictionary defines a document as: n. a popular generic word among lawyers for any paper with writing on it. Technically it could include a piece of wood with a will or message scratched on it.

This one defines it about the same: DOCUMENTS - The deeds, agreements, title papers, letters, receipts, and other written instruments used to prove a fact. Documents is also understood evidence delivered in the forms established by law, of whatever nature such evidence may be, but applied principally to the testimony of witnesses.

Re:What's the problem?

[WhyDoYouWantToKnow]

No. Due to the (often decried as faulty) moderation system, you don't get karma for being funny. That's why someone who's being funny will get mod'ed insightful then adjusted to funny. For some reason ./ doesn't think that being funny is good for your karma. I'd really hate to live in their nirvana where there is no laughter.

Re:What's the problem?

[JMcWright]

You owe me a new keyboard.

Re:What's the problem?

[InvalidError]

Since the RAM used to process HTTP requests usually gets reallocated and rewritten every couple of miliseconds, the data is usually gone long before you even get a chance to cause a kernel panic or memory dump to prevent further memory alterations.

It is impossible to comply literally with that order: it is fundamentally incompatible with the normal operation of RAM/SRAM which are meant to store a computer's working data set only for as long as it is necessary to accomplish the task at hand... and even within that task, countless memory reallocations and modifications (data destructions) are bound to occur.

Computer data, be it RAM or HDD, gets reallocated/modified/destroyed as a matter of course during normal operation... computers cannot operate without continuously destroying some data. Building computers with WORM memory would be ludicrously impractical and unfeasibly expensive. Compliance with the literal interpretation of this order to any useful extent is physically impossible since each server would need its own storage media factory to supply the ~100k DVDs/day needed to dump all memory writes.

Of course, we all know what the judge really meant to order is the logging of relevant data... he just did not know anything about how real-world computers work and TS failed at educating him. It is quite scary how judges can issue such unreasonably uneducated orders.

Re:What's the problem?

[ByTor-2112]

Not true. The application just reads and writes from a socket, not caring what the endpoint of that socket is. Then entire application could be written in a way that it never even knows what the IP address is... Only the operating system need know. And as far as the operating system is concerned, it is simply pushing random bits through an interface. To create a link between the two might fall under the "extra creation". Even though all the information is technically in the RAM, it is more like a jigsaw puzzle than a real document.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is obvious: We allow ignorance to rule.
      We all know stupid can not be fixed. The sad part is that ignorance can.

Re:What's the problem?

[tinkerghost]

Not true. The application just reads and writes from a socket, not caring what the endpoint of that socket is.

I refered to software - as the collection of kernel, network stack, and web server - not just the web server. More importantly, while the web server could be written in a way that it never even knows what the IP address is, the http protocols are supposed to be providing that information in the headers.

And as far as the operating system is concerned, it is simply pushing random bits through an interface. To create a link between the two might fall under the "extra creation". Even though all the information is technically in the RAM, it is more like a jigsaw puzzle than a real document.

There is definatly a requirement that the data be extracted & presented in a human readable format. That is the issue at hand, is it originally a 'document' or isn't it? If the contents of RAM are a document, then this is transcription which is permissable. If the contents of RAM are not a document, then this is being required to create documents for discovery, which isn't permissable.

From other places, it appears that torrentspy is running diskless servers with everything in memory. The arguments that the information is held on the servers for up to 6 hours seems insane to me, unless they are already capturing these logs in a ramdrive. If these logs have been captured & are stored on a ramdrive, then they loose a lot of ground on the argument that they are not documents - they have a degree of permanence & can be manipulated exactly like a document. In this case, we are discussing transcription from a ram drive to a more permanent media - there is no creation of a document.

If on the other hand we are discussing a system with no access logging at all, then the requisite contents of RAM will be shifting blocks of RAM with little to no permanence which can NOT be manipulated like a document without damaging the system. I can delete an entry to a log file with no harm to the system, try zeroing the data block holding the IP address & request. In this case, there is a requirement that actual data be collected & a new document created.

So while I don't like this ruling, and I certainly don't like the implications of the ruling, I can certainly see a situation where the argument does work. Variable data stored in ram certainly isn't a 'document' in the traditional sense, however a logfile stored on a ram-drive meets all of the criteria.

Note again that I do not know if torrentspy is logging to a ram-drive or not, if anyone actually knows their architecture and setup, then we could resolve the issue.

Re:What's the problem?

[the_digitalmouse]

if this is regarding a TorrentSpy tracker service, then it sounds to me like they want the IP addresses as they are connecting to TCP/IP or UDP stacks, between the tracker and torrent-client. while logging those temporary links is not a techincal issue, the sheer volume of the logs created would be huge. i imagine several gigabytes per day would be possible with a very active tracker. and reasonably useless against those clients that use proxies or ADSL (in which companies like Deutsche-Telecom reset the home user's IP address every 24 hours or so).

Re:What's the problem?

[aichpvee]

Maybe I'm just too sarcastic and ironic, but the funniest things often seem to be the most insightful... or maybe it's just so sad you have to laugh to keep from crying.

I think they stopped having funny effect karma because the "In Soviet Russia..." trolls were all at Excellent.

Re:What's the problem?

[mikiN]

Most modern PC's have this tech on board. It's called Suspend-To-Disk...

Re:What's the problem?

[mikiN]

Before the flames start, I want to add my assumption that suspending and then resuming is supposed to restore everything that is needed to resume normal operation (including a crime in progress).

Re:What's the problem?

[Apocros]

generally speaking, you're quite right (so i'm not disagreeing here, just offering an anecdote...).

while debugging an issue on one of our graphics boards, i found that a number of samsung DRAMs (some variety of gddr1 parts) would hold their contents for a good 15+ seconds without any accesses or refresh cycles. how do i know? i disabled the refresh cycles, disabled the display-refresh requests (debugging via serial console on an adjacent dos box), and had a scope and logic analyzer hooked up. the only memory accesses were my directed read/write cycles. the part wasn't in self-refresh mode either... and i could consistently read back the arbitrary data that i wrote to the framebuffer 15 seconds prior, with no way for the part to refresh that particular row (or any other), save my subsequent read. it was pretty neat, albeit fairly pointless.

and no, it didn't really work quite so well with a power-cycle in between accesses. some bits did seem to retain their state for a while (5+ seconds), but reading both bytes (x16 parts) wasn't very reliable.

Re:What's the problem?

[Hal_Porter]

Of course, we all know what the judge really meant to order is the logging of relevant data

Exactly. The people suing them demanded a list of IP addresses, times and the name of the torrent they downloaded so they can subpoena the user name from the IP address and then sue the users. TorrentSpy have a tracker which knows that information. It keeps it in Ram but doesn't store it on disk. But that's equivalent to destroying evidence which means they are in deep shit legally. I guess the judge can force them to keep logs and then they are off the hook. But most of the people here are quibbling about the language and pointing out that they know more about technology than the judge. Which is true, but if you were in this situation and you did something cute like pulling the DIMMS and sending them to the court you would probably end up in prison on some legal technicality.

The judge doesn't understand technology but she knows that TorrentSpy have to provide any information requested if it is evidence of criminal activity - they can't protect the anonymity of their users if those users are breaking the law. Or rather if they do, the people running TorrentSpy will end up in jail.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the opinion in order to provide an informed comment. The judges received input from computer forensic experts. Realize that words are used differently by different professions and in legaleeze judges are constrained by words used in legal rules. The first tech question in this case was whether data in server logs could be preserved and produced when the data existed six hours in RAM. It appears the parties did not dispute this. Next was how and how much. Defendants apparently did not make much of a showing and made erroneous assumptions on volume that suggested to the judge that they were not convincing.

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful there. They'll say you've encrypted the file using XOR, and then they'll come up with the decryption key that has been anonymously donated to them. Congrats, you've just given them 50000 terabytes of all the data they'll ever want :P

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

nobody uses SRAM in computers nowadays

Damn, someone better go let those L1 and L2 cache makers know, before they go off and include some SRAM in their latest releases.

Re:What's the problem?

[InvalidError]

If I wrote a custom PHP web app (like a tracker) and did not bother to add function calls to write data to disk, the judge would have to order that these be added before he could claim that evidence was destroyed since the information up to that point was never meant to be preserved - I do not keep transcripts of my phone calls or other oral communications so a judge cannot order me to hand over such transcripts and claim that failure to comply will be considered as destruction of evidence... he'll have to order wiretaps/bugging (logging) and let the authorities work with that afterwards.

For sites like TS, there is pretty much only one practical solution: move operations to somewhere beyond the reach of US legislation with pretty lax copyright/IP enforcement laws.

BTW, the *AA are lobbying to get police funds moved from physical crimes to copyright enforcement... I think the *AA VIPs need a taste of real crimes to set them straight - they need to be reminded that real crimes can cause permanent physical and psychological injuries beyond what can be quantified in dollar value while copyright infringement only cause vague and vastly exaggerated hypothetical revenue loss.

Re:What's the problem?

[Lehk228]

good luck starting a CPU without it erasing the cache or chopping it up to access the cache with special hardware.

What's next?

[raeb]

"Please sir, hand over your motherdisk."

Re:What's next?

[Opportunist]

I insist that you hand over your ISDN drive. And your SCSI modem.

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

Saying cable modem is just as bad.

Re:What's next?

[timelorde]

SCSI modem? How moderne!

When I was young, all we had was a Megabyte Modem.

And we were happy to have it, despite all the screaming...

Re:What's next?

[heinousjay]

Complaining about a common term promoted by the purveyors of the equipment is geekery at its best. I salute you sir, truly your pedantic nature must make you a hit at parties.

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

I wasn't complaining, just making a simple observation. Actually, none of my friends are geeks. I must be the only geek without them. I can only joke about Dilbert comics at work! Sitting at a bar with friends, I would just get a blank stare.

Re:What's next?

[k1980pc]

I think he should have targeted those tubes which carry the data. Turn in all the ethernet cables.

Re:What's next?

[WinterSolstice]

I have a SCSI NIC :) does that count?

Sure... it's for an Apple Plus, but it's still a nice NIC

Re:What's next?

[bassgoonist]

Actually, if you believe wikipedia (I do in this case), modem IS the correct term http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem

"Broadband modems should still be classed as modems, since they use complex waveforms to carry digital data. They are more advanced devices than traditional dial-up modems as they are capable of modulating/demodulating hundreds of channels simultaneously."

Re:What's next?

[Andy Dodd]

Why? Just because it uses a different medium (cable TV RF channels instead of the POTS voice band) doesn't mean it isn't still a modem.

MODEM originally meant MODulator/DEModulator (with the two Ds mashed into one). That's exactly what a cable modem is - a QAM modulator and a QAM demodulator. (OK, OK, it has a bit more than that, such as an Ethernet bridge in most cases.)

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

Since they carry digital data over a digital medium, I would disagree. They aren't "modulating" anything.

Re:What's next?

[Rob T Firefly]

I had one of those. It worked perfectly until I spilled carrot juice on it.

Re:What's next?

[westlake]

"Please sir, hand over your motherdisk."

And when flash drives become the norm that is more or less how the order will be worded. Temporary storage is still storage. The judge only cares that the information recorded "in RAM" still exists and can be retrieved.

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

"Modulate" in this case, means to alter the pitch of an analog audio signal. Either way, it's not worth arguing. It was just an observation. Terms do tend to change with time...

Re:What's next?

[JunkmanUK]

So it should be called a QAMMOQAMDEM?

Re:What's next?

[jkmullins]

Actually, they are. The data has to be modulated to a particular frequency that equates to a television channel, using 64-QAM or 256-QAM modulation on the downstream (to the customer) channel, and QPSK or 16-QAM on the upstream (to the provider) channel. The cable system I used to work for used 64-QAM on 105MHz downstream (a very, very low frequency for a cable modem, equating to channel 97 digital 1 if I remember correctly) and QPSK on 26MHz (pretty typical). Just because the channel is carrying digital data doesn't mean it isn't modulated.

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

Even your source (Wikipedia), says strictly speak "cable modem" is wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but "modulation" for the devices originally called "modems" means altering the pitch of the audio signal. They were analog devices by definition. But I guess times are a changin'.

Re:What's next?

[maxwell demon]

Well, a cable clearly isn't a digital medium. However, for some strange reason ethernet cards are not called ethernet modems :-)

Re:What's next?

[jelle]

"Since they carry digital data over a digital medium, I would disagree. They aren't "modulating" anything."

The 'cable' is coax, which is an analog medium, not digital. The 'cable modem' modulates (QPSK/QAM, etc) the bits into an analog signal that then again is modulated into a fixed channel (usually 5MHz wide) and puts it onto the coax...

There really is a lot of 'modem' (MOdulator DEModulator) activity going in in a cable modem...

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

I didn't know that. Is that still true for digital cable? Regards, I would still argue it's not modulating a tone (the usage that spawned the term "modem").

Re:What's next?

[jelle]

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but "modulation" for the devices originally called "modems" means altering the pitch of the audio signal. They were analog devices by definition. But I guess times are a changin'.

Nope...Altering the pitch? Only FM does purely that (frequency modulation), and even telephone modems have used more advanced method than that for any speed over 1200 bps...

PSK = Phase shift keying: modulates the phase

AM = Amplitude modulation (...)

QAM (as used in both your telephone modem and also in cable modems) = Quadrature _AMPLITUDE_ modulation... modulates the IQ (amplitude and phase together)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation

"In telecommunications, modulation is the process of varying a periodic waveform, i.e. a tone, in order to use that signal to convey a message, in a similar fashion as a musician may modulate the tone from a musical instrument by varying its volume, timing and pitch."

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a law firm. Lawyers want everything printed. We can figure out what they mean when we are handed a bunch of 2GB PST files they want printed (import into Outlook and print) but try explaining to a lawyer that you have no way of printing two copies of a 10GB MDB, DAT, or DBF file on 8.5x11 inch paper.

Re:What's next?

[Orange Crush]

Since they carry digital data over a digital medium, I would disagree. They aren't "modulating" anything.

Dial up modems may have been true and proper modems, but I think it's a little ironic how pedantic some are being over the use of the term "modem" when dial-up modems and modern telephones don't actually have dials.

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

That's a good point.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pronounced 'sexy'.

Re:What's next?

[drxenos]

OK, I'm not totally right, but I'm not completely wrong. http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahwe.html

Re:What's next?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Temporary storage is storage, but ram isn't storage. There is no really good analogy for what ram is, beyond the thoughts that bounce around in your head.

Re:What's next?

[Opportunist]

An SCSI NIC? Are they legal in the US?

Doesn't matter, hand it over. If we can't use it, we'll find that out in time. And while you're at it, hand over that monitor too.

Could anyone explain why the heck they usually also take the monitors along when they seize computer equipment? Or is it just 'cause everything called "evidence" is forfeited (and thus can be turned into money for the feds) if you're found guilty.

Re:What's next?

[bassgoonist]

"Under a stricter definition, a cable modem is not a modem but a network bridge" So...how strict are we then?

Re:What's next?

[zsazsa]

Why is a 5MHz signal on a cable line not a "tone" while one on a phone line is? Simply because you can't hear the signal the cable modem puts out with your ears, while you can hear the signal a modem generates?

As many above have said, there definitely is modulation and demodulation going on, and the exact same kind: QAM. It's just at a higher frequency with more bandwidth.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they carry digital data over a digital medium

There is not "digital medium". There are digital layers, but they are always analog at the bottom.

Re:What's next?

[zsazsa]

And yes, it's the same for digital cable. In fact, digital cable television uses the exact same modulation as the cable modems use. The whole reason for modulation is to carry a signal robustly over a lossy analog medium, in the case of a POTS modem, the telephone wire, and in all cable installations, a coaxial cable. The coaxial cable just has way more bandwidth (in the traditional, analog sense).

Re:What's next?

[RobertLTux]

actually since in 99.9999999999% of the time the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification Customer Premises Equipment is actually referred to as a MODEM even by those in the trade you get
[font style="huge blinking red"] BZZT Wrong [/font] Thank You for Playing!!

Re:What's next?

[jelle]

That article is wrong. A coax is analog and in order to use it for digital signals you need a modem, period. A 'digital TV channel' is modulated using QAM (ATSC) or QPSK (DVB) too...

Re:What's next?

[fbjon]

Actually QAMQADM, the 'M' is for Modulation. It looks vaguely arabic... Qam q'adm.

Re:What's next?

[terrymr]

Modulate doesn't have to apply to audio only ... go read about radio, the term modulate is used all over the place even where audio is not involved.

Re:What's next?

[RobertLTux]

how small can you print and do they want it human readable?? Think 16 bit raw bitmap (600dpi printer and 7.5X10 printable area =54 000 000 bits per page

heck you could get that in a single ream of paper with some error correction (math works out to 185 and change pages)

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? So AM and FM radio are modulating the audio signal, and not the RF carrier? Glory be, the things I learn on Slashdot from idiots spewing garbage from their dicksuckers.

Re:What's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those RAMs won't tell them nothing. It's those gossiping EWEs they want. They're sure to spill the beans....err...bits

Re:What's next?

[fatphil]

I may disagree with you, but I fully support your right to demonstrate publically how utterly ignorant you are of quadrature aplitude modulation.

An(ti)gram:
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation = our ultra-antiquated dial-up modem

Re:What's next?

[fatphil]

Completely OT - but have you seen /Blink/ yet?

I'm too old for Bonnie Langford episodes, being a Tom Bakerite, but I have to say that the latest /Blink/ is an absolute classic.

Re:What's next?

[fatphil]

It has been held as true in the context of copyright law, that RAM copies of data (programs/data from the hard disk) are not "copies", else you couldn't run a program without making copies of it. I think that ought to make data in RAM not documents by the same logic.

Re:What's next?

[smart.id]

You were supposed to just take that reply to your message like a man and shut up.

Re:What's next?

[evanknight]

Not my fuzzy modem!

Lol.

[JustNiz]

They could claim that they lost all the information because it was stored in ram, which they unplugged to comply with the court order.

invasion of privacy

[St. Arbirix]

Besides the stupidity of try to gather information from confiscated RAM, how in the world could this be a privacy concern?

Re:invasion of privacy

[LordSnooty]

I imagine that if the judge gets a clue and decides that the contents of the RAM are the tangible documents, then basically every bit of information on the server from top to bottom will have to be turned over to the court. Even if the server was hosting other, unconnected sites or even databases.

Can't tell right now 'cos the link is sending me to zdnet.comnull ??

Re:invasion of privacy

[iluvcapra]

As the TFA explains, the judge means that the RAM would become a legal document, and that any information put on it would have to be retained for later examination, and that if this ruling were extended to things like SOX, a SOX-complying company would have to keep transaction logs or images of their RAM so that the state of the RAM at any point in the past could be accounted. EEep.

Re:invasion of privacy

[laughing rabbit]

Damn! I knew we should have stopped referring to 'pages' of memory.

Re:invasion of privacy

[brunascle]

sure thing, court. you supply us with the hard disk space to store any and everything that gets put on my RAM, and i'll get right on that. i presume you'd like full copies of every moment... so lets see... the front side bus is 800MHz and we have 16gigs of RAM, so we'll be needing 400 bajillion GBs of space.

Re:invasion of privacy

[advocate_one]

and that if this ruling were extended to things like SOX, a SOX-complying company would have to keep transaction logs or images of their RAM so that the state of the RAM at any point in the past could be accounted.

oh please let it be so... that would show just how ridiculous it is... the sheer amount of disk space and processor cycles required to effectively record the state of RAM for enterprise servers would bring this whole stupid ruling crashing down...

Re:invasion of privacy

[iluvcapra]

oh please let it be so... that would show just how ridiculous it is...

Wholly agree. Another implication in the article is that someone could hit you with a court order, and the moment you were served, if your machine was on, turning it off (or even killing a process or doing something that caused a pageout) could be destruction of evidence.

Re:invasion of privacy

[Martin Blank]

ZDNet appears to be forwarding referred clicks (possibly just from Slashdot) to the .comnull address. It works fine if you just paste in the link and press Enter.

Re:invasion of privacy

[bstorer]

Think about it: how are you going to write the image of RAM to the hard disk without using any RAM? If you do use any, you'll have to record that, too.

Re:invasion of privacy

[Altus]

So as I understand it the RIAA and MPAA have been using independent contractors to find people sharing files. Couldnt you accuse such a contractor of breaking into your computer illegally? I mean sure, they probably didn't but you can still make the accusation and go through discovery and require these contractors to store the contents of their RAM for the rest of time.

Turn about would be fair play right?

Re:invasion of privacy

[Yewbert]

Oooh! Oooh! I feel an opportunity for a car analogy!

This is like requiring that a driver save and turn in the fuel-air mixture (volatile, even - geddit?) in his car's cylinders, riiiiiiiiiiight,... NOW! While he's driving.

Re:invasion of privacy

[TheRaven64]

It wouldn't even be remotely feasible. My laptop has a bandwidth of just over 5GB/s. The average hard disk has a maximum throughput of 50MB/s. That means I'd need 100 hard disks just to be able to capture the data while I'm generating it quickly, let alone store it. In a busy server, you could easily get through 100 disks a day...

Re:invasion of privacy

[IMarvinTPA]

Uh, would I be in contempt if the screensaver activated on its own? Heck, moving the mouse to prevent the screensaver would cause stuff to happen in the RAM.

IMarv

Re:invasion of privacy

[Stewie241]

don't hard drives have cache memory? Better record that too, just to be safe!

Re:invasion of privacy

[walt-sjc]

In a different story, I assert that this is correct, but it depends on the law in your state, since each state is different.

Re:invasion of privacy

[jawtheshark]

Just letting it run will cause stuff to happen.... You don't even have to touch it. Internally state is changing constantly.

Re:invasion of privacy

[cbroglie]

The files are inside the computer!

Re:invasion of privacy

[brusk]

A better car analogy: turn in your speedometer to test whether you were speeding.

Re:invasion of privacy

[smartr]

I wonder if they'll subpeno the ethernet cables... and the privately owned wires in the wall... If they're not owned by AT&T they're not protected. The information clearly passed through them, so by default, they stored that information.

HD

[gregoryb]

Maybe she meant 'hard drive'? The majority of the people I supported while working IT during college used the terms RAM and hard drive interchangeably.

-gb

Re:HD

[AKAImBatman]

No, nothing like that. I can only presume that the judge's order explained the reasoning in detail, but basically the court has decided that if it's in RAM it's an electronic document. To that end, the judge has ordered TorrentSpy to turn on logging to capture these "electronic documents".

It's basically some wild legal theory invented to provide a method of giving the MPAA the discovery information they want. The bright side is that the judge has decided that the individual IP addresses may be redacted to prevent TorrentSpy's users from being targeted.

Re:HD

[jafiwam]

Yeah, he probably meant "Hard disk data" or something.

Though, it's still pathetic. A court order needs to be specific, and correct. Anything else is a travesty of justice and open for abuse. How else are they going to expect it to be legally binding? "Send me your thingamajig and the whatzit or you go to jail for 30 days." How is one supposed to comply with something that makes no sense? Plus, point that out or be sarcastic and you risk pissing off the judge and landing in jail.

The judge made himself look too incompetent to pick up the phone and call a nephew for a reality check. Heck, I'd do that type of work for $30 an hour if he wants to email me I am ready.

Just more proof that all portions of the legal profession have no freaking clue and are out of touch with just about any reality aside from their own little money grubbing ways.

Re:HD

[Anonymous Coward]

It is funny to me that you indicate that the Judge (he, as you refer to her) is too incompetent to phone a nephew about the nature of RAM, yet you obviously did not take the time to either read the article or you did not understand it.

Even better is that you feel this constitues 'proof' of some sort.

I think the problem, not with this ruling but with others, is that people like you somehow find themselves in the position of being Judges.

Re:HD

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't this basically fall under the realm of "unconstitutional"? I mean this judge is essentially working now in the Executive Branch by ordering the gathering evidence that technically hasn't yet been created. Isn't that basically what cops are supposed to be for?

Re:HD

[Paracelcus]

A college professor (the local tech contact for a local Green Party chapter)told me that one of our more active members was "running low on computer memory and didn't have any more space for precinct maps" and that he was going to "fix" it.

I wonder what subject he teaches?

PS I volunteered but I'm too mouthy and loud for them!

Re:HD

[voice_of_all_reason]

Are you crazy? You can't play "oh, I meant" games here. He is Serious Judge and this are Serious Court.

What if he said "Oh, he's not guilty, but I really meant 5 years in prison."

Re:HD

[Anonymous Coward]

"running low on computer memory and didn't have any more space for precinct maps"

IME, it is very common for users to call disk drives "memory". And while geeks like us don't use it that way, it's probably technically correct, both for the everyday and technical meanings of "memory", even though we don't normally use it that way. True, it's not random access memory.

Merriam-Webster says
4 a: a device (as a chip) or a component of a device in which information especially for a computer can be inserted and stored and from which it may be extracted when wanted; especially : ram b: capacity for storing information
"especially" RAM, but not exclusively so.

Personally, it annoys me far more when people say "the Internet" when they mean "the web", thus leaving no word for the entire set of protocols, etc. that comprise the Internet.

(posting AC since I've used mod points in this discussion)

Re:HD

[Random832]

IME, it is very common for users to call disk drives "memory". And while geeks like us don't use it that way, it's probably technically correct, both for the everyday and technical meanings of "memory", even though we don't normally use it that way. True, it's not random access memory.

Yes it is.

Blank RAM

[Esion Modnar]

And these guys get arrested for destruction of evidence when they find that the RAM is blank. Un-freaking-believable.

Re:Blank RAM

[Txiasaeia]

I think once the court officers turn over the RAM to the guys in charge of the computer forensics lab, the techies there will have a good laugh and explain exactly what "RAM" is. I doubt anybody will get in trouble because a judge doesn't know a PS/2 port from a SATA connector.

Re:Blank RAM

[fyrie]

You beat me to it!

Re:Blank RAM

[LordSnooty]

We're now at a stage where people should be employed by the courts system to act as educators and technical experts for any case - not advocating one side or the other of course but at least clarifying points like this for a judge. Why is this not happening.

Re:Blank RAM

[zCyl]

Apparently "Your honor, you seem to be an idiot," is not an effective objection.

Re:Blank RAM

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I doubt anybody will get in trouble because a judge doesn't know a PS/2 port from a SATA connector.

Don't count on it. In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data. You are presumed guilty if you won't (or can't) supply the appropriate password.

If this case happened in the UK, the RIP Act would appear to make you guilty by default if you couldn't supply a password that "decrypted" whatever data was in the RAM when it was next powered up to turn it back into whatever they think was there before. And given that these are people who don't appreciate the volatile nature of RAM, I wouldn't hold out much hope of explaining to the judge why it's not possible to comply with their ruling.

Aren't you glad that our inept legislators and your incompetent judges work in different jurisdictions?

Re:Blank RAM

[Volante3192]

Catch-22. Best catch there is.

Re:Blank RAM

[Stonent1]

I'm thinking they are wanting more along the lines of a core dump or snapshot of the RAM. I don't know the actual device names but something along the lines of dd if=/dev/ram of=/root/ramdump

Re:Blank RAM

[bcattwoo]

And these guys get arrested for destruction of evidence when they find that the RAM is blank. Un-freaking-believable. No, because the article summary misrepresents the actual ruling. TorrentSpy claims that it can't turn over certain data because it was never logged. The judge ruled that since the data in question was in the RAM, TorrentSpy was in possession of said data and must preserve it for discovery, i.e. start logging it. The judge in no way ruled that they must physically turn over the RAM chips.

Re:Blank RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

The judge did ask for the RAM, not the memory module, right? Why not unsolder the RAM chips and provide them to the court.

Mij

Re:Blank RAM

[halcyon1234]

And these guys get arrested for destruction of evidence when they find that the RAM is blank. Un-freaking-believable.

This is something I'd actually be worrying about if I were them. I hope they cover their asses on this one. My suggestion: Comply with the court order by handing over a list of all the RAM sticks that are in production. Then have the courts to arrange for a evidence collector to come in and retrieve the RAM from the servers. Be very careful to specify that you are complying with the request to hand over the RAM, not the servers.

This accomplishes two things. First, it preserves the chain of possession. It will allow the "evidence" to move directly from the source into the courts hands, so the MPAA can't bs anything about it being tampered with.

And second, it takes the responsibility of the care and handling of the evidence out of the defendant's hands. Once the neutral third party comes in, one of three things will happen:

1) They will remove the RAM, and in doing so destroy all the data on it (because that's what WILL happen). The defendants cannot be charged with destroying evidence, because it was not their responsibility to handle it. It was the court's. (Even better if it was a third party of the MPAA's choosing, makes them look like idiots).

2) The third party will have a good laugh, and report back to the courts that it is not possible to physically take the RAM without losing the data on it. The MPAA will look like an idiot for asking, and it will hurt their case. (Even better if it was a third part of the MPAA's choosing, makes them look like idiots-- again).

3) Worst case scenario: The third party shows up with some program to dump the RAM to a USB drive. Hopefully, the defendants can argue against this, saying that they agreed to hand over the physical RAM, but did not authorize a third party to access their system, scan their data, or run any programs on their servers.

Re:Blank RAM

[ultranova]

Aren't you glad that our inept legislators and your incompetent judges work in different jurisdictions?

Inept ? Incompetent ? You just described one of the most brilliant schemes to get around the laws proctecting ordinary citizens from arbitrary arrest I've ever heard of, and you call the people who came up with it incompetent ? Just what are your standards for competence, pray tell ?

Re:Blank RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, the computer itself may delete the contents of ram 1000 times per second, especially if things are being swapped in/swapped out or if subprocesses are serving each user. Things move around RAM all the time, that is why it is RANDOM access. The limit of what is considered a legal document on a computer should be anything stored in the filesystem of that computer. Not the RAM, not the SWAP space, and not a ramdisk, but "long-term" storage -- the document paradigm on most modern systems.

Re:Blank RAM

[voice_of_all_reason]

Isn't that a schroedinger's cat? By running a program to capture ram, you'd be altering the ram.

Re:Blank RAM

[pclminion]

In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data.

Problem solved, then. When they request the key, give the wrong one. The data will then decrypt into random garbage. You say "Yep, that's what it is." How can they prove otherwise?

The trick is to select a cryptosystem that does NOT do data fingerprinting (i.e., a system that will let you know if you've chosen the wrong key).

Re:Blank RAM

[Jehosephat2k]

"or run any programs on their servers." of course, doing that would taint the evidence, the contents of the RAM running the program they are using to extract it. What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.

Re:Blank RAM

[Pfhorrest]

Inept ? Incompetent ? You just described one of the most brilliant schemes to get around the laws proctecting ordinary citizens from arbitrary arrest I've ever heard of, and you call the people who came up with it incompetent ? Just what are your standards for competence, pray tell ?

Given that the ostensible function of government is to serve the people, when it fails to do so and instead starts messing with people's lives, I'd call that incompetence. Whenever someone does something else instead of what they're supposed to be doing, they're incompetent; just like I'd be an incompetent employee if I spent all day at work watching YouTube videos and leeching off of free coffee instead of, you know, working. (Or for a better analogy still, if I spent all day going around interfering with my employers' and coworkers' business, yelling at them, threatening them, and interfering with their ability to get their work done, instead of doing my job).

Re:Blank RAM

[rlazarus]

So, tell them it was a one-time pad, supply the appropriate decryption key so that it decrypts to "Nothing illegal going on here, nope!", and everybody's happy.

Re:Blank RAM

[squiggleslash]

Well, yeah, but we also need lawyers to be employed by Slashdot to act as educators and legal experts for any story, not advocating one side or the other, but at least clarifying points like this for people likely to be bamboozled by misleading summaries.

It's a shame legal jargon quoted a little out of context should have an entire community thinking a judge wants someone to pull the RAM cards out of computers and hand them over to the plaintiff.

Re:Blank RAM

[AnObfuscator]

Inept ? Incompetent ? You just described one of the most brilliant schemes to get around the laws proctecting ordinary citizens from arbitrary arrest I've ever heard of, and you call the people who came up with it incompetent ? Just what are your standards for competence, pray tell ?

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. -- Robert J. Hanlon

Re:Blank RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt anybody will get in trouble because a judge doesn't know a PS/2 port from a SATA connector. Don't count on it. In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data. You are presumed guilty if you won't (or can't) supply the appropriate password. Such a presumption exists only after the prosecutor proves that you did at some time possess the "appropriate password". RTFRIPA.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00023--e.htm# 53

53. - (1) A person to whom a section 49 notice has been given is guilty of an offence if he knowingly fails, in accordance with the notice, to make the disclosure required by virtue of the giving of the notice.

            (2) In proceedings against any person for an offence under this section, if it is shown that that person was in possession of a key to any protected information at any time before the time of the giving of the section 49 notice, that person shall be taken for the purposes of those proceedings to have continued to be in possession of that key at all subsequent times, unless it is shown that the key was not in his possession after the giving of the notice and before the time by which he was required to disclose it.

            (3) For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if-

    (a) sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and
    (b) the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt. (emphasis added)
This presumption catches people who say (truthfully or otherwise) "I've forgotten my password".

Re:Blank RAM

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Such a presumption exists only after the prosecutor proves that you did at some time possess the "appropriate password".

I appreciate that such a safeguard is written into the letter of the law, but what matters is the practical interpretation in a court. In the sort of case where we might expect this law to be applied, how would anyone ever prove that someone once had a password? What standard of evidence will be required, realistically?

Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[Obyron]

Isn't RAM volatile? Doesn't turning off the machine blank it out, such that whoever is seizing it is pretty much just getting blank RAM? I mean, this might be great if your law firm needs to update its workstations, but...

I'm sure this is probably a stupid question, and so I'm leaving off my karma bonus in case it's answer in TFM. ;)

What's the point?

[Higaran]

I thought that all RAM unless its MagneticRAM, which isn't sold yet loses the data on it as soon as you pull it off the mother board. Could this be a typo an the document actually supposed to mean the hard drive?

Re:What's the point?

[drinkypoo]

I thought that all RAM unless its MagneticRAM, which isn't sold yet

MRAM is indeed being sold in limited quantities, but it's only used in certain devices. I forget who's making it, but someone else can continue your education. Or you could google.

You're correct insofar as you can't get it for your PC yet, but incorrect insofar as that it's being sold.

Re:What's the point?

[Random832]

Is this "MagneticRam" you're referring to a thing of a future, or of the past?

Re:What's the point?

[drinkypoo]

MRAM and bubble core memory use (as I understand) more or less the same principles of physics, but are made quite differently.

Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad Gateway
The following error occurred:
[code=DNS_HOST_NOT_FOUND] The host name was not found during the DNS lookup. Contact your system administrator if the problem is not found by retrying the URL. Oh no, they got Zdnet too!

Great idea there, judge.

[smellsofbikes]

Smug user: *click*, yank, "Here ya go: my brand new Kingston DDR2 ram. Much fun may you have with it, ha ha ha ha."
Clueless investigator: *jam* *snap* *click* "Hey, wait, this isn't formatted with FAT32! It looks like completely random noise! You must be encrypting the data we're looking for! Hand over the password or it's off to a secret terrorist prison for you!"
Smug user suddenly looks less smug.

Re:Great idea there, judge.

[Anonymous Coward]

You may laugh, but here at my job we had an issue with an array seized for evidence, and nearly got in trouble for providing data that had been "irreversibly encrypted". The evil encryption scheme was the ext3 filesystem, which they tried to mount as NTFS. Never underestimate the stupidity of legal "experts"

Re:Great idea there, judge.

[untaken_name]

Thank God you weren't using AIX and JFS. They'd NEVER have been able to figure that one out.

Re:Great idea there, judge.

[smellsofbikes]

I wasn't laughing: I consider that scenario to be plausible at least for the first round, where all the officials are lower-level morons. I've also encountered people who think that if a Windows machine can't read it natively it must be encrypted. Which, let's be honest, it IS. Any information you can't read is encrypted, but RAM yanked from someone's machine by a moron looks, to the moron, just like information that can't be read, and that's where the problem lies.

Re:Great idea there, judge.

[Darundal]

Why would that you consider that data to be encrypted? Encryption implies purposeful obfuscation of the data (purposfully making it unreadable to a Windows machine, to continue your example). Usage of another filesystem is hardly an attempt to make it unreadable on a Windows box, merely usage of either the default recommended filesystem for your operating system or usage of a filesystem that performs well. The unreadability is merely a side effect.

Re:Great idea there, judge.

[smellsofbikes]

But to someone who is looking at a mass of unreadable data, it *looks* encrypted.
To be more semantically precise: all communication is encrypted. The only question is whether the recipient has the decryption codec installed. 'blue' means photons of a particular wavelength, and each of the words in that definition are, themselves, defined in terms of other words, all of which relate to underlying concepts, right? so without a hook into the language, you'd be listening to gibberish. Consider the use of Navajo in WWII for secret communication: it was an encryption standard that one side knew and the other side didn't. The Navajo didn't consider their language encryption: it was just their language. But the Japanese who were listening thought it was. Same goes for any filesystem you can't read: it's encrypted, functionally speaking.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[RingDev]

You are correct, so the only viable solution is to remove the RAM with out turning off the machine!

-Rick

PS: KIDDING!!!

link is broken

[chip rosenthal]

Here is a working link to the article: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6190900.html

Re:link is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another one:

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3218

Re:link is broken

[Otter]

Also, the description of the ruling is inaccurate. The issue is whether data "stored" in memory but never written to disk are sufficiently stored in the user's system that a user might be compelled to archive them to disk or paper. The judge isn't AFAICT saying that the bits actually in the RAM can be demanded.

Re:link is broken

[tedshultz]

copy and paste on the link works, but not linking from slashdot! Is this a (weak) attempt to prevent the slashdot effect?

Re:link is broken

[Tridus]

A misleading Slashdot story, I'm shocked!

Re:link is broken

[kylehase]

Does this mean that a good preventative measure for corporate transparency is to archive every bit of RAM for a specified amount of time? ...and you thought Google had bad data retention policies.

Re:link is broken

[Otter]

My impression is that, at least in this case, the issue is logging specific data going forward, not retroactively demanding bits that were in memory months ago. (And definitely not demanding the RAM itself.)

What??

[laughingcoyote]

RAM is, by definition, temporary data storage. Very temporary. How exactly does the judge think this could be accomplished in practice? You can't exactly pop a RAM card out of a machine, bring it to court, and expect there to be anything usable or readable on it when you get there. Nor could you log more than a tiny fraction of what goes through it (and even doing that would take a great deal of storage capacity over time). Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility?

Re:What??

[dark404]

Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility?
yes.

Re:What??

[Esion Modnar]

Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility?

Why, yes. Yes they do. They think they can have the letter M stricken from the alphabet, repeal Tuesday, and control objective reality itself. I think there's a Simpson's reference to back me up on this one.

Re:What??

[mhall119]

Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility? Um, probably. Isn't that how most non-technical users regard their computer?

Re:What??

[Nom du Keyboard]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. Thankfully, truly effective copy protection is not possible.

And it's a good thing it isn't, lest people go back to the old fashioned method of stealing physical property out of the stores themselves.

Re:What??

[Opportunist]

Well, I can't talk about judges, but I do know a lawyer who did believe me when I told him the Magic Smoke Theory.

It was NOT easy to keep him from airtightening his servers...

Re:What??

[dlenmn]

RAM is, by definition, temporary data storage. I thought it was, by definition, Random access memory... Silly me...

Re:What??

[SpeedyGonz]

Do judges just think computers are magic boxes which they can order to do whatever they may like, and that there are no limits of technical feasibility?


I guess the judges watch too much CSI: infinite resolution security cameras, flashy multicolored OS interface thingies that do the analysis and solve crimes themselves...

Re:What??

[Short Circuit]

How exactly does the judge think this could be accomplished in practice? With proprietary software? Not easily. (Though you can get access to process memory via /proc, if you really want to.)

With Open Source, it's much easier. Behold, another reason to use Open Source.

Re:What??

[magus_melchior]

Well, given there's a judge in the UK who was struggling with the concept of a "web site"... ...

Yup.

New Law

[Orclover]

It should be Law that legal officials of all sort have to have a "qualified technical advisor" present when giving any court order or summons. Mind you we geeks would then lose our main advantage when it comes to skating on the fringes of laws *cough"mp3 collection"cough*.

Re:New Law

[revlayle]

you know, i almost couldn't figure out what you were typing there with the *cough*s around the phrase "mp3 coll...

*GUNSHOT*

*THUD*

Re:New Law

[mhall119]

It's usually up to the plaintiff and the defendant to provide expert knowledge, not the court. I doubt the judge came up with this "get their RAM" idea all by himself, more likely the plaintiff asked for it and the judge was just granting the request. So either the plaintiff has an idiot expert (highly likely given past experience), or they think they can actually recover enough information from the defendant's RAM (which may be possible, but I wouldn't bet my case on it).

Re:New Law

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The thing is, that would just lead to a whole bunch of not particularly well-informed people who have enough time/money to secure the appropriate (probably very expensive) certification from the appropriate (partial to vested interests but technically unqualified) regulatory body being given a loud voice in legal matters that their expertise does not merit. It would be like paying thousands for so-called expert witnesses, but for every court case that ever involved technology. Oh, and probably having them be deemed right by the court automatically, even if you (as someone who does know what they're talking about) present an informed opinion that disagrees.

Tagging (beta): greatintheory, hopelessinpractice

Re:New Law

[raddan]

Your subject line made me think of something else-- A judge, ordering a defendent to start logging, without any relevance to the case at hand, sounds an awful lot like legislation. Which a judge is not entitled to do.

Re:New Law

[Jehosephat2k]

Let us not forget the true purpose of this. The true purpose of this is to harass. It has nothing to do with evidence or discovery. The people filing this suit and the judge is perfectecly aware of how ridiculous their request is.

This is what our government is evolving into, a tool of the powers that be to harass and control the population into submission.

Broken Link?

[RealErmine]

Try this: ZDnet.com

Volatile Memory?

[_anomaly_]

The story page wouldn't load for me, so I'm responding without having RTFA unfortunately.

But what can they hope to obtain from the RAM? Isn't it considered volatile memory because it loses any data once power is lost? Am I missing something? Are there some remnants of the data previously stored in the RAM remain once power is lost?

Re:Volatile Memory?

[BosstonesOwn]

Yes , depending on the ram it can actually still maintain the pointers as well. Data is retrievable from ram same as its retrievable from flash also.

Link?

[stevenvi]

The link redirects me to http://news.zdnet.comnull/.

Assuming this is a real news article, however, I wonder at what stage the court wants a snapshot of the RAM? Any attempts to copy it would, I assume, modify the current contents of it. Or do they want to actual chips out of the computers? The defendant would probably then be charged with destroying evidence when the chips were found to contain no data...

Re:Link?

[mhall119]

The defendant would probably then be charged with destroying evidence when the chips were found to contain no data... What would be even more amusing is if the plaintiff (MPAA) tried to put it into another computer to read it. Because the act of booting would destroy whatever remnants of data might possibly be on the RAM, so technically they would be the ones destroying evidence.

Re:Link?

[gimplar]

I'm not exactly sure how'd they do this either. Most RAMs these days have to be refreshed at a pretty high frequency. on top of that, I'm fairly confident that you can't dump the contents of the entire physical RAM without having kernel level access to the machine. Even then, have fun trying to map application variables to your 2GB+ memory space.

Re:Link?

[cbiltcliffe]

The link redirects me to http://news.zdnet.comnull/.

And, ironically, that's what the plaintiff is going to find when they examine the RAM.

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week....

Just one question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this RAM have a Hemmy in it?

Re:Just one question

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Hemi.
You're welcome.

Re:Just one question

[Duhavid]

I believe you mean "Hemi".

Use "strings" and find out!

hmm..

[JustNiz]

I wonder if its floppy or hard ram?

Re:hmm..

[Coraon]

Depends, is there cute girl ram around?

Re:hmm..

[Virgil Tibbs]

I used to have a 5 inch floppy, but its got reduced to three and a half now.... :(

Re:hmm..

[feedmetrolls]

I wonder if its floppy or hard ram?

That's what she said!

Re:hmm..

[gold23]

No.

Definition: ram, n., a male sheep.

Re:hmm..

[Red Flayer]

I should hope not, as a ewe is the female version of a ram. A castrated ram (the closest to a "cute girl ram") is called a wether.

However, there is no such thing as a wethernet, so forget transmitting data that way.

Re:hmm..

[revengebomber]

Bah, you shoulda seen mine... a solid 8 inches across! Now I can't even find anywhere to use it...

What they want you to do is

[advocate_one]

log everything relevant to serving pages as it changes in RAM as it could be discoverable evidence... so even if you weren't logging it, they want you to log it anyway as the Judge believes that it had presence for a brief period so may be relevant evidence

Re:What they want you to do is

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Which is what TFA said, so I'm thinking the logs should be in hex.

Re:What they want you to do is

[advocate_one]

time to start encrypting my RAM as well as my disks so it only exists as real data in the cpu registers themselves...

Re:What they want you to do is

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. While not technically feasible to hand over RAM, this would open the door to requiring logging to track the contents of RAM. Doesn't matter if your info is not stored to disk. If it was in RAM, it is fair game to be presented as evidence.

Re:What they want you to do is

[CompMD]

Still, doesn't the act of taking a snapshot of the contents of memory modify the contents of memory?

Re:What they want you to do is

[Code Master]

I'm sorry, but we will need you to log the contents of your CPU registers, especially the IP register...

Re:What they want you to do is

[makomk]

Hmmm... do routers keep the packets they forward in RAM briefly? If so, this could get interesting...

Seinfeld?

[eharvill]

Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George wants to keep his high score in a Frogger arcade machine and rigs up a car battery so he can unplug it and move it elsewhere.

Re:Seinfeld?

[Joe The Dragon]

newer video games use nvram or have ram with a battery backup on it.

Re:Seinfeld?

[Rob T Firefly]

Frogger didn't. And despite the Seinfeld episode, it didn't have a high score table with players' initials either.

Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[DaveWick79]

Judges should not be allowed to preside over these cases unless they have a basic knowledge of computers. I would have to assume that the volatility of RAM was explained to the judge and if he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle, how is he going to be competent with the remainder of the case?

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[benfinkel]

Do some googling. This Slashdot bit doesn't adequately explain it.

Torrentspy has been ordered to retain records of all of the information that is in their RAM as part of discovery. Not turn the physical RAM chips over to the court.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[loxosceles]

He's a judge, silly. By fiat, judges are competent in any cases over which they preside.

Sort of like how certified idjits are --again, by cultural fiat-- competent in the area of certification.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[Peter Desnoyers]

After reading the order itself, it seems to be a straightforward application of the silly legal theory - established in other copyright cases - that copying a program into RAM counts as copying ("fixating") under copyright law.

A couple of thoughts:

When I make a cell phone call, I would bet that my voice is stored in RAM on the cell phone for some period of time. Does that make it available for discovery?

Wouldn't it be possible to get just about every large corporation in America to oppose this ruling?

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[Opportunist]

Unfortunately, you can only reject a judge if he's partial, but not if he's incompetent. If you could, there would be a heavy shortage for judges fit to do IT cases.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[Anonymous Coward]

Jacqueline Chooljian
  ^
  l
  l
  l

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[mypalmike]

he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle

Moo.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[thisjustin]

If you had RTFA you would know that he's a she, and maybe since you hadn't you shouldn't have assumed a gender. It kind of shows why there still really isn't equality when people have such ingrained notions of gender roles.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[Mattintosh]

Or perhaps that's a side-effect of the proper use of the English language. When you don't know the gender of the party you're using a pronoun for, you use the masculine gender. Of course, that applies only if you don't RTFA. But "assuming" masculine gender is correct and is not some sort of anti-whiny-bitch-feminist agenda or part of a presumed gender role.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[westlake]

When I make a cell phone call, I would bet that my voice is stored in RAM on the cell phone for some period of time. Does that make it available for discovery?

The basic rule is relevance. If it would be helpful to have the recording, you can ask for the recording.

Edison's early wax cylinders were only good for about 100 plays. The volatile RAM of another era. But that the recordings were ephemeral wouldn't have made them inadmissible.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[Anonymous Coward]

What does equality have to do with someone assuming the judge was male instead of female? We are beings of repetition, so when most judges are male, it is natural to think and assume that. The judge was not oppressed or denied anything because of the mistake.

I'm OK with that

[wumpus188]

I am hiding everything in /dev/null anyways.

Re:I'm OK with that

[Short Circuit]

I replaced your /dev/null node with a socket leading to my server.

(You know, I should try logging what goes into /dev/null on my box. It might be interesting.)

Sure

[Nom du Keyboard]

Sure, I'll unplug it and send it to you right away, your Honor!

Re:Sure

[Idbar]

Let me back it up, just in case something is missing.
If it is the case, I can restore the backup on another RAM and re-send it to you.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[Anonymous Coward]

the only viable solution is to remove the RAM with out turning off the machine... Wouldn't that void the warranty?

Hey why not

[Orleron]

Sure, Your Honor, please accept my RAM neatly packed in a box full of fluffy software to cushion any impact from shipping. Shall I compile a cover letter with that?

precedent

[nomadic]

Keep in mind this is a magistrate judge, which is one step below a trial court judge (who is already generally below 2 levels of appeals courts). Magistrate judges work on a very fact-specific level, so I don't think this ruling would make even persuasive authority. I think I cited a magistrate judge like once, and that was just because the subject was so obscure I couldn't find anything else...

Re:precedent

[Otter]

Keep in mind this is a magistrate judge, which is one step below a trial court judge (who is already generally below 2 levels of appeals courts).

Also, keep in mind that you're reading this on Slashdot, which operates at one step below typical geek literacy (which is already generally below two levels of normal literacy). The judge understands what RAM is; the submitter and editor just can't read. (Not that most of the commenters can either, but given the bad link, they can get the benefit of the doubt this time.)

Series of tubes

[BlackCobra43]

Two words : Ted Stevens. Living proof that you do not need ANY knowledge of computers to be in charge of legislating any aspect of computing.

Re:Series of tubes

[Constantine XVI]

And who ever said he SHOULD be in charge of any computer-related legislation?
Much like this judge.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[BosstonesOwn]

Actually you can still retrieve data from ram , just happens to be your stuck with only what was in ram before the ram was removed , which on most good servers would be the server actually going down . Maybe some pages that they were serving but not much else.

There is a reason both banks and the government destroy ram and hard drives when they cycle out computers now.

So smarty - but are we?

[Anonymous Coward]

True - turing off the computer should clear the RAM but maybe that's not the complete picture.

With RAM sizes increasing so much of the last few years is it unreasonable to think that advanced forensics can't get any useful information off them?

Confusing story

[Just some bastard]

The issue appears to be that a dump of the servers physical RAM would contain connected IP addresses. Removing the addresses from a RAM dump would be much more complex than removing or obscuring such data in a system log file. TFA is gibberish.

They want logs of what was in RAM??

[joekampf]

RTFA, "RAM is the working storage of a computer and designed to be impermanent," McCarron said. "Potentially your RAM is being modified up to several billions of times a second. The judge's order simply reveals to me a lack of technical understanding." The Judge wants a log of what was in RAM. Just nuts. There isn't enough storage in the world to save every state change of RAM in one of these huge servers for more than a few days. The hell with privacy. I think this ruling can single handedly destroy the technology industry making the price to run a single server astronomical.

Re:They want logs of what was in RAM??

[jnaujok]

On top of all this, what does an IP address look like in RAM anyway. Answer: 4 bytes of random data. It's usually stored internally as 4 bytes of data, one to represent each of the bytes in the quad.

Basically, every four byte sequence in the computer can correspond to a (probably valid, as the IP4 space is 75% full) IP address. This will let them sue just about the entire world for using TorrentSpy.

What a crock.

Re:They want logs of what was in RAM??

[joekampf]

They are also assuming that anyone who goes to Torrent Spy's web site is also downloading copyrighted materials. Just because I go to Torrent Spy doesn't mean that I am not downloading something legal.

Even if they had the information off the ram...

[CaptainPatent]

Even if they had the information off the ram, there's no way to tell what context they're running the information in.

1001011010100100 - Well with this information I have no choice but to rule the defendant innocent... oh wait...
1001011010100101!! That changes everything! - I have no choice but to rule the defendant guilty !

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[ruewan]

A printout would be a beautiful way to give the judge what he asked for.

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the rightmost bit is the evil bit.

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[Seakip18]

"Well, your honor, if you look at address 0x000fa223, 0x000fa224,0x0x000fa225...."

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it changes everything, the last example had the innocent/guilty bit set to 1 (guilty), duh!

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[SydShamino]

1001011010100100 - Well with this information I have no choice but to rule the defendant innocent... oh wait...
1001011010100101!! That changes everything! - I have no choice but to rule the defendant guilty !

Well, in your example, bit 0 is clearly the evil bit.

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bender: It was horrible! A nightmare!

Fry: What happened?

Bender: I dreamt I was in a place of 0's and 1's and all of a sudden... I saw a two *whimper*

Fry: It's ok Bender, don't worry. There's no such thing as 2's.

Re:Even if they had the information off the ram...

[surlyben]

Yeah...Lets say you pull the data off the memory a thousand times a second. If you print it out at a generous ten thousand characters per sheet of paper (maybe you are using big paper, or a small font), that's what? One hundred million sheets of paper per GB per second?

What will they find??

[ruewan]

Are the going take the RAM out of the servers and examine it? It seems as though the MPAA is getting everyone to spy for them. According to the L.A. Times AT & T has agreed to spy for the MPAA as well. Because AT & T wants to make money from pay-television. It is just like my ISP here. They started shaping bit torrent traffic 1 day and announced their television service the next day. http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-piracy13ju n13,1,5531531.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

And that "dude" can send me in jail?

[Anonymous Coward]

...a spaceship to mars, please, and quick! :-(

I hope..

[JustNiz]

I hope they handle the RAM with rubber gloves and masks to avoid possible cross-contamination of computer virusses.

Network cables are next

[Anonymous Coward]

Next up will the the data on the network cables traveling over the internet tubes

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[cpt kangarooski]

Isn't RAM volatile?

RAM just means that any portion of the memory can be read and written, as opposed to having to access memory sequentially (as with a tape). There's many different technologies. Since people want it to be very fast, affordable, and reliable over a long period of time, some technologies are better than others.

DRAM is volatile, and widely popular. But there are other kinds of RAM in the past (e.g. core) which weren't volatile, and there is R&D going on to make a form of non-volatile RAM that is superior to DRAM.

Indeed, all else being equal, I'd rather have non-volatile RAM. It'd be great for laptop battery life and preserving data against power loss. You'd want to add a switch that could purge the RAM in case you needed to restart from a crash, though.

What really needs to be turned over...

[dahl_ag]

is the ethernet card. THATS where you will find your evidence! Duh.

It seems pretty specific to me

[grahamsz]

In the course of that case, U.S. District Court Judge Jacqueline Chooljian has ruled that TorrentSpy must turn over RAM data -- which is usually stored only temporarily on servers -- over to the court, disregarding TorrentSpy's privacy and free speech arguments.

The data that is in RAM seems like it's perfectly valid for a court to request. Of course you'd have to be a moron to be using TorrentSpy at this point in time.

Re:It seems pretty specific to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The data that is in RAM seems like it's perfectly valid for a court to request.

RAM cells recharge thousands of times per second, and each charge has the potential (har har) to put new information in place. Trying to retain any sort of meaningful data about the state of a server's RAM at any arbitrary point in time would be beyond impossible, literally. The sheer volume of data would be physically impossible to store even for single entity, much less manage or perform any sort of forensics on.

The only way it could conceivably work would be if applications that put data into memory knew to store a copy of contextually important data permanently in logs, and for the most part anytime that becomes relevant (such as in website visits) the functionality is already there.

In other words, if the judge had any clue as to the technology she was dealing with, she would have simply ordered TorrentSpy to either enable existing logging options, or put some form of logging into place. Asking them to retain state data about RAM is beyond ridiculous.

Re:It seems pretty specific to me

[grahamsz]

It didn't stipulate how much "ram data" needed to be turned over. Perhaps they could take a single dump to disk and call it good?

Re:It seems pretty specific to me

[zcat_NZ]

The data that is in RAM seems like it's perfectly valid for a court to request. Of course you'd have to be a moron to be using TorrentSpy at this point in time.

I suddenly feel an urge to use torrentspy for all my Linux ISO downloads.. perhaps all of slashdot should do the same as soon as we know they're logging it, and flood the logs with perfectly legal torrent downloads.

No Problems here!

[Catiline]

I don't see any problem with this ruling; TorrentSpy should take the RAM sticks out of their servers, place them into a static free bag and bubble wrap, then mail them to the MPAA's lawyers.

What, there wasn't any data on them? Oh, guess you don't know what "volatile storage" means.

Pirates and researchers rejoice!

[bugnuts]

Load up RAM with lots of copyrighted works, send copies to them in discovery, and *poof* instant public record of it. I'd make sure to load up a legally purchased movie or two into ram. Heck, I'd buy extra ram and buffer an entire movie just for this.

Sounds like a way to bypass certain DMCA restrictions, too, such as the provisions against bypassing copy protection and such.

You would think that???

[www.sorehands.com]

Remember judges and lawyers don't always understand technology.

I had Defendants in one case demand that I hand over the spam. The discovery act requires me to produce it in the form nomally kept in -- OS/2 files, with my notes in the extended attributes. He then later asked that they be printed in the form it is normally viewed. Of course, I responded that I'd be happy to do it, but he have to pay for that discovery.

Re:You would think that???

[AKAImBatman]

Remember judges and lawyers don't always understand technology.

I remember. What I'm saying comes from TFA (which nobody bothered to read) so the judge obviously understands enough to concoct this wacky legal construction.

Re:You would think that???

[Hijacked Public]

Since all we have is her decision in the case, I'd have to assume that the in court arguments made it around to the fact that TorrentSpy isn't logging connections to their server therefore the logs requested by the MPAA do not exist. The MPAA probably made the argument that the data did indeed exist (it appears the location they chose was in RAM), but it just wasn't being captured.

The order is far closer to an order to maintain logs than it is a request to pull the RAM out of the server and mail in. But being dramatic about how stupidly stupid the MPAA is and Judges and everybody but Slashdot geeks is much more fun than actually reading and understanding a court order.

What is most worrisome about the ruling, if everyone would shut up about physical RAM chips, is that a transient collection of 1s and 0s is considered a 'document'.

Re:You would think that???

[drinkypoo]

He then later asked that they be printed in the form it is normally viewed.

did you tell him you could sell him an OS/2 machine? normally, it is not printed before viewing.

Re:You would think that???

[jafiwam]

I bet you are great fun at parties.

Re:You would think that???

[Anonymous Coward]

In the tech support biz, we call that 'knowing just enough to be dangerous'.

Re:You would think that???

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that you can reduce any paper document to a "transient collection of 1s and 0s," the idea doesn't seem all that far fetched nor worrying. It's all data regardless of how it is embodied.

Re:You would think that???

[freedumb2000]

What is most worrisome about the ruling, if everyone would shut up about physical RAM chips, is that a transient collection of 1s and 0s is considered a 'document'. It could be quite a beautiful sight to hand over thousands of pages full of hex code from memory dumps and have the MPAA pay for the discovery.

Re:You would think that???

[Anonymous Coward]

So how long (and in what capacitity) does a collection of 1s and 0s have to exist for you to consider it a document?

Re:You would think that???

[Aceticon]

Actually, the implications are potentially a lot wider than what it might seem.

The thing is, most modern digital transmission devices also have RAM ... and communications going through them are also temporarily stored in RAM. The same logic as the judge used - the contents of the RAM is a document, thus logging the IP addresses from the RAM is a form of transcription, not the producing of a new document - can also be used to order parties to implement measures to "copy the unprocessed digital signal from the RAM of a digital communication device" ... in other words, wiretapping (potentially on a massive and arbitrary scale, if what we're talking about is a digital telephone exchange).

Re:You would think that???

[JEGSYDAU]

Good point, Why not hand over a few hundred pages worth of 1's and 0's. There's your document... it's up to the MPAA to interpret it.

The beating on the dead horse continues...

[UP_Minstrel]

Your horse ate a carrot from a bunch that I sold someone who wasn't supposed to share them.
Your horse has the ability to digest carrots, but some chemicals may remain.
We demand the horse's spleen as evidence.

one word, two meanings

[Anonymous Coward]

a hard drive is that thing you turn on and off, plug your keyboard in, and put your cd's in... as a tech it's pretty much understood that you never take the computer stupid literally when tech terms are involved. the judge didn't ask for random access memory, the judge asked for that stores information. you can't be literal with an illiterate. the techies given the ram will have a good laugh, the judge will be schooled and re-issue the command with proper language, and next week the process will start all over again with someone else.

More details...

[AP2k]

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9727965-7.html

According to that article, we see that the judge knows basically what RAM is.

They thing that puzzles me is that if one were using, lets say, closed source service software, how the hell are you supposed to figure out exactly where the IP is in memory to log it?

all well and good but....

[otacon]

Even if they could prove you went to torrentspy...theres nothing they can do......even if they proved you downloaded a torrent...there is nothing they can do, as torrents have no copyrighted data.....tey would have to prove you downloaded the content the torrent pointed to, which at that point is out of the torrent spy loop...but who know what they'll try to say

Re:all well and good but....

[thisjustin]

Mod parent up! Congratulations for being the first person to say something other than the same thought that immediately came to every reader's head after reading the teaser. Yes, very good, we all know that RAM is volatile, how hilariously ill-informed this judge is... You actually thought about the implication for more than two seconds which probably puts you above most readers.

Re:all well and good but....

[Donniedarkness]

Good point (I wish I had mod points).

I save my .torrent's to my desktop, THEN I load up BitTorrent (this is so that Opera doesn't try to handle the torrent). Sometimes, between downloading the .torrent file and loading BitTorrent, I decide I don't want the file anymore and delete it (before I ever even drag the .torrent file into BitTorrent). How are they supposed to sue me for copyright infringement just for downloading a .torrent file?

At best, they can only say "Well, you INTENDED to illegally download some program at one time or another!"

Re:all well and good but....

[Anonymous Coward]

in a moment of insanity believing the MPAA lawyer knew the technical implications of such a ruling and deducing that from past rulings on mere .torrent's , it's pretty much all a scare tactic (again..) to envelop the technically challenged in a orwellian fear...

Re:all well and good but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for AG Alberto Gonzales's potential 'attempted copyright infringment" bill.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[megaditto]

Depends on the type of RAM. Some kinds are non-volatile (e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_memory or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM )

What the judge really wants is the dump of /dev/mem or some such.

But - in theory- it might be possible to recover the data from 'volatile' RAM even after powerdown (looking at the alignment of dust particles or examining the capacitors with a tunneling microscope, or something like that, though it will probably require multimillion dollar setup and years of time, not worth using to bust a few 'pirates.'

Seems like a fair turnaround

[heinousjay]

Considering the sheer stupidity displayed by technologists who expound upon legal matters (for examples, see this site, any given story), why is it fair to expect that legal experts would be strong on technology matters?

Still, this is an opportunity for nerds to play their favorite game: look how much smarter I am than you.

Re:Seems like a fair turnaround

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like one of the Slashdot IANALs got themselves some modpoints today.

Simple Solution, +4, Seditious

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a magnet.

Subpoena to turn over what you are thinking

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

This is the law firm of Cluel Ess and Dum Bass. This is a formal legal notice for you to immediately write down what you are thinking and turn it over to us.

Re:Subpoena to turn over what you are thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

F U ...

I am so sorry, I just lost my train of thought..

Over Simplified Headline...

[nick_davison]

It has nothing to do with handing over physical ram. It's about whether you have a piece of information in memory but deliberately fail to ever write it to a log - and whether you can be compelled to add that to your logs.

The more worrying demonstration of ignorance for me is:

"To imagine my information being disseminated without my written or verbal consent is unnerving," she said. "Then again, if I'm doing something I know is illegal, can I protest?"

If you smoke dope in your own home, can you protest if the police break in without any kind of a warrant?

If you like oral sex in any of the states that ban it, can you protest that your landlord installed a hidden video camera to catch it?

If you had depression and were hospitalized for being potentially suicidal, can you protest if the hospital gives the information to a former spouse who's trying to get child custody?

Of course you can damn well protest. Violation of your privacy is not acceptable simply because you're happening to commit a crime at the time.

It's especially not acceptable if you're not even necessarily committing a crime (seizing all server logs of all people using a torrent when only some of them are sharing copyrighted information over it). "Many people in group X are criminals, thus we're pulling all information on group X" is absolutely not acceptable. Imagine if the argument was "Many people in this housing project are involved with drugs. So we're demanding complete phone taps for everyone that lives there and we'll decide who's a criminal once we have that."

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[Puls4r]

Excellent argument. Also, I'm curious how this would fall under the 5th amendment. I'm having trouble thinking of some type of legal analogy. The information exists, however it is not available to law enforcement in its current form. So they try to force the defendant to give it to them, thus incriminating themselves? It would seem to me that a good argument could be made that if the authorities want it, they should have to create a warrant and go get it themselves.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is Off-Topic but is Oral sex illegal in some states? Sorry I live in England and had no idea that this is the case!!

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[nick_davison]

Joss Stone had a similar problem:

She moved to the U.S. at 16, started dating her producer's son at 17. She then proudly went around telling everyone how great the sex was - afterall, it's legal in England from 16. In California where the californicating was happening, the age of consent is 18. Everyone sat around wondering how long it was before he got arrested as a child molester because of her pride in her relationship.

Places where oral sex is illegal: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington D.C.

In Georgia those charged and convicted for either oral or anal sex can be sentenced to no less than one year and no more than 20 years imprisonment.

In Nevada it is illegal to have sex without a condom.

In Willowdale, Oregon it is against the law for a husband to talk to dirty in his wife's ear during sex.

In Washington State there is a law against having sex with a virgin under any circumstances (including the wedding night!).

In Fairbanks, Alaska it is illegal for mooses to have sex on the city sidewalks.

http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/flux/gSpot/sexLaw.h tml

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[westlake]

If you had depression and were hospitalized for being potentially suicidal, can you protest if the hospital gives the information to a former spouse who's trying to get child custody?

The kid of course will be in the custody of family services.

It seems well within the right of the hospital to notify the child's next of kin. If a parent's rights have not been extinguished by the court, then his right-to-know that his child may be in danger is not for the hospital to decide.

Violation of your privacy is not acceptable simply because you're happening to commit a crime at the time.

That is far, far, too sweeping a statement.

If a hidden camera captures a rape and abduction the "expectation of privacy" of the defendant isn't going to get the evidence excluded - and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[teh_chrizzle]

If you like oral sex in any of the states that ban it...

everyone does... those are the states where it's the most fun :-)

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[AK Marc]

If a hidden camera captures a rape and abduction the "expectation of privacy" of the defendant isn't going to get the evidence excluded - and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court.

It won't be kept out of court. Courts are notoriously lenient about otherwise illegal actions by private citizens that record crimes. However, people have been sued for similar things and lost. So the rapist will get tried with the tape in court, but would probably also win the civil suit against the landlord. Depending on the laws, the landlord would end up in jail himself. That has happened before. The reason being that he didn't just tap the one place, but all of the tenants and when the one was discovered, the others were the ones prosecuted on.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[Jherek Carnelian]

It's especially not acceptable if you're not even necessarily committing a crime (seizing all server logs of all people using a torrent when only some of them are sharing copyrighted information over it). "Many people in group X are criminals, thus we're pulling all information on group X" is absolutely not acceptable. Imagine if the argument was "Many people in this housing project are involved with drugs. So we're demanding complete phone taps for everyone that lives there and we'll decide who's a criminal once we have that." Sadly, this attitude seems to becoming more commonplace - read about the bizarre yet true case of the federal IMBRA law, recently upheld in court.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so is a pregnancy in Nevada considered sufficient evidence to convict, or can you argue that the condom must have failed?

Presumably Nevadans are becoming a rare species....as should Washingtonians, unless they are sensible enough to go out of state for the big night. Although I suppose there is some obscure law about transporting people across state lines for immoral purposes.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but all of your examples are clearly illegal. While forcing them to log everything is obviously an invasion of privacy, I don't believe it is illegal. You can still protest, but I don't think anybody is going to offer you any relief.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[Myopic]

Yeah, okay, sure man, I totally agree that it's a travesty of justice, but on the other hand, that's the way lots of laws work. Drugs are illegal because a lot of people who use them turn into lowlifes, so we don't let anyone take drugs. We put sex offenders on special lists after they get out of jail just because a lot of them are prone to recommit their crimes. All cars have to obey speed limits, even though many cars can safely be driven much faster. We force everyone to get their cars smogged, even though a very small amount are causing almost all exhaust pollution. We force all companies to file complex financial records even though most of them follow all the rules voluntarily.

As libertarians, we think all these policies are bad policies, but we don't live in a libertarian dictatorship, we live in a democracy, where we are outvoted by people who care less about freedom than about social order.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[nick_davison]

If a hidden camera captures a rape and abduction the "expectation of privacy" of the defendant isn't going to get the evidence excluded It tends to depend both on location and who made the recording...

An illegally procured recording by the police will get excluded in most places.

An illegally procured recording by a private citizen that was then given to the police is less likely to get excluded.

And that's "per trial" - every time the rapist gets a retrial/appeal, he stands a chance of getting the tape thrown out again. If the remainder of the evidence would convict anyway, ditching the tape will make no difference. If the tape being excluded is enough to win a trial, it only has to happen once.

and he won't get a penny from a jury if he takes his victim's landlord into court. He won't get damages relative to the scope of punishment he received for his crime (financial compensation for five years of lost liberty, etc.).

He would however have little, if any, problem suing for "emotional damages" from discovering he was filmed by a hidden camera. If his lawyer was worth anything, the first thing he'd do would be ensure any mention of "rape" never came before the jury. All they'd get to hear would be how a poor man had his reasonable expectation of privacy violated by a pervert with a hidden camera - sure, a crime may have been committed that he got caught for but they'd be left guessing whether it was murder or simply smoking a joint and so societal prejudice against rapists would be blocked.

So, no "Five years of lost earnings plus punative damages" - but several thousand dollars would be entirely conceivable.

Re:Over Simplified Headline...

[bogjobber]

Even if those laws are actually on the books, they are all unenforceable (except maybe the moose thing).

principles

[Anonymous Coward]

if he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle, how is he going to be competent with the remainder of the case? Maybe the litigants cud moove for dismissal then milk it for publicity, but I suppose the cow-ards are graduates of Bovine University.

Re:principles

[dr_dank]

I have a beef with the AC, mod down his bull.

I just read the judgment

[www.sorehands.com]

She does seem to understand how it works. It was a thorough and well reasoned decision. I still have problems with it on the issue of server load and privacy, but she seemed to addressed the privacy issue.

I am a bit suprised that she did not order Plaintiff pay the costs for this data collection which is permitted when discovery product has a cost associated with it.

The Tubes

[Beer_Smurf]

Maybe the Judge should ask to see the "Tubes".

Re:The Tubes

[Rick Genter]

Why would she want to see a bunch of white punks on dope?

Oh, wait...

unsure why the story has been rejected here so far

[palewook]

nonetheless here's a few links on it: http://techdirt.com/articles/20070610/172049.shtml http://news.com.com/TorrentSpy+ordered+to+start+tr acking+visitors/2100-1030_3-6189866.html?part=rss& tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news http://www.techfirm.com/logorder.pdf http://torrentspy.com/privacy.asp

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[redelm]

This is unbelieveable, especially in a Civil case. Sure, you can order the production of documents. Even expost format conversions. But I've never heard of imposing a requirement to make new documents.

The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced. Worse (more intrusive) actually, since RAM must be slowed to be recorded. RAM is as ephemeral as air.

I expect an appeal. I understand the desireability and value of the evidence, but rules are rules.

Fourth Amendment, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

And all we have to do is implement a program that can sit in RAM and read the entire contents of memory out to a storage device without changing any of the RAM. All we need to do is create a garbage collector that indexes everything in memory ...

Wait - that's called an external bus monitor. This judge has required them to install a bus monitor on their servers and log everything from boot to shutdown. Good luck finding enough storage space (not to mention interpretation) for what will effectively be a memory bus Snort.

Next, the video RAM will have to be recorded and handed over as evidence. Then, they'll want our neural impulses as they travel through our bodies.

I would just print /proc/kcore

[shadowofdarkness]

It would be worth the cost of the paper.

Appealable order?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this an appealable order, or do they have to submit a motion for reconsideration telling the magistrate that they are, in effect, a bloody idiot?

I mean, I'm reasonably sure that records stored in RAM and such are explicitly ephemeral under the law, that this action is otherwise unprecedented and unsupported by law, and that it's just a pro-copyright magistrate trying to find some way to weasel things in support of an online service they dislike.

Granted, IANAL so I may be wrong about some of those points, but I'm pretty sure the ruling as a whole makes no sense: it would be prohibitively expensive to log everything that went into RAM, and if they redacted IPs as the order allegedly allows, would give no benefit to anyone.

Is there any way to give this magistrate a clue? They appear to be lacking, given all the other shenanigans that have gone on in that same case.

I just hope that it happens to be appealable and that someone higher tells that magistrate (in a nice way) that what they said was really stupid, so we're just going to ignore it now. Of course, is the judge in this case any better? SCO vs. IBM has shown me squabbles over discovery like this going back to the magistrate judge if they're motions for reconsideration and to the judge the magistrate is working for at other times. I don't think I saw any go higher than that, but I guess we'd have to see them grant something else, like an SJ motion, before it can go any higher up the chain?

And for anyone who is wondering why I'm asking nomadic this, it's because I'm pretty sure he's an actual lawyer and I'm certainly not looking for legal advice, just a way to understand this case and its impact better.

I also have this crazy idea about putting a few torrents of my own on TorrentSpy. Maybe one with court documents that detail how the movie studios' screwball accounting cheats pretty much everyone who is given a stake of the net profits (movies don't make net profits, EVER)? Name it 'Spiderman 3 (telecine)' or something. Let them present THAT as evidence in court... :-)

but what about copyright?

[coyote-san]

Before people snicker too loudly, remember that copyright law (as I recall) applies to any document once it hits tangible media... and RAM is considered tangible. It goes away when the power goes out, but it can be read -- and memorized -- by anyone on that system. It can be read by anyone sent the message via IM. Are you prepared to argue that the author has no rights until she hits 'print' or 'save'?

In that context, demanding the RAM still sounds technically naive but not nearly as silly.

(I haven't RTFA, but the comments suggesting that the judge was merely saying that one party can't disable logging and then claim that the information is unavailable is unacceptable. They can log so they must log, and then turn the logs over to the other party.)

What about Sorbanes-Oxley?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Does not that act prohibit companies from destroying documents and requires that all documents to be saved for, what 3 years? So we need to back up our RAM every second and keep the backup for 3 years? Wow, rush now to buy shares in disk drive vendors. Their business is going to booooom!

Re:What about Sorbanes-Oxley?

[iibenyayaii]

To my understanding, RAM can only store data very temporarily. The RAM will lose everything after it is unplugged. Maybe the judger know more than me or it is harddisk instead of RAM. If this abstract is true, we may really need to back our RAM every second and keep the backup for three years. lol

It *is* a cable modem, genius...

[Anonymous Coward]

A cable modem is a type of modem that provides access to a data signal sent over the cable television infrastructure.

What's so bad about calling it what it is? It surely is a type of 'cable' hardware, used within the cable tv industry, and it surely is a modem, as it modulates and demodulates signals to send and receive data.

Much of it maybe be on a drive anyway

[camperslo]

Quite a bit of what's in RAM and some of what was previously in RAM may be found in the virtual memory swap space of on a drive. Perhaps that's what they really mean? I don't know what data is there on the server in question, but it likely goes beyond what one normally thinks of as written to disk. Consumer machines often have contents of pages surfed and email viewed lingering in the swap space. Browser use often does leave behind much data beyond the contents of their own (and JAVAs) cache files. Something similar on a server should be unsurprising.

Thought control

[drDugan]

At every point in our technical development, the most functional machines are always compared to humans. Now, the closest machine that can emulate actions similar to our own is the mini(personal) computer and connected devices. This analogy will continue, as machines get more and more functional.

For purely technical reasons, we have a convention now that a person's thoughts are private. We have no technical way of reading a person's active thoughts or dreams trolling their memories. We have different levels of social responsibility for a person's thoughts and actions.

Aside from the technical issues of volatility, this issue is central to what information is public and what information is private. Taking a copy of a computer's RAM, which is technically possible in a running computer using, say and external hard drive, by order of a court, is a very real possibility, and one that has extremely deep implications for what information society deems as "discoverable".

I think the real issue here - the one that would be fascinating to discuss - is for senescent beings (and computers are marching that way closer and closer), is there a line that we should not cross and allow other beings (humans, computers when we agree they are sentient) to have truly private thoughts? According to the mentality of this ruling, no any information you can grab is fair game. It bodes very poorly for future generations with highly advanced MRI devices that can read thoughts.

Re:Thought control

[Xanni]

"senescent beings"? I do not think that word means what you think it means. It means "aging". Perhaps you were thinking of "sentient" or "sapient" beings?

Re:Thought control

[DedicatedErik]

Once computers get intelligent (I argue that they aren't already, but I'm working on that :) ), if they obey Asimov's law [link] they should tell us if there is something we should know.

When the computers' thoughs in terms of RAM are no longer private, this really voids any encryption scheme currently used. But this is restricted to formalized / absolute processing. Once processing becomes more fuzzy, analog (yeah, may really happen), decentralized, uncoordinated/self-organizing then it will become a tedious work to reverse engineer what is 'thought', similar to the difficulties we are having now with reading thoughts in humans (or even simpler animals).

The common formalized, coordinated von Neumann type computing is totally compromized when the RAM footprint can be read (if you know what to do with it). There is no fundamental difference (you still have to look / interpret / reverse engineer), but it's a lot easier than with fuzzier systems such as Neural Nets.

I can also imagine that chip designs for encryption are not nessesarily using the RAM to store a key. They might have a specialized encryption/decryption unit with on die memory that can be regenerated or used, but not read. The interface of the chip could simply disable that. Would be a nice application for FPGAs (which is fascinating technology!)!

Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[hummassa]

When I was a kid, RAM was made of flip-flops and I had to go to school with three feet of snow, and it was uphill both ways. Oh boy.
Nowadays, BosstonesOwn (794949), RAM is made out of capacitors and they have to be "refreshed", that is, some circuit re-reads/re-writes the same values all over many times per second. One second without refresh, and all the data is gone for ever and ever and ever.

BEFORE: a flip flop has an input, a clock, and an output. when you put 0 in the input and pulse the clock once, the output is now 0; if you put 1 in the input and pulse the clock, the output now has 1. This is how one bit of memory is stored. Also know as SRAM, this kind of memory is fairly large in terms of integrated circuits (like 20 transistors in-die), is reasonably fast, and it's still found in L0/1/2 caches of microprocessors, in quantities in the range of Megabytes.

NOW: you have a capacitor, if you put 1 in its input (that is the same pin as its output) it retains this one for a fixed period of time (T). if no-one tries to read this bit in, like, T/2, a circuit in the memory reads this bit, and if it's 1, writes again 1 in its input. Also known as DRAM, this kind of ram is smaller per-bit (one capacitor in-die, 40-60 times smaller than a bit of SRAM), but the memory itself has to add in the end the size of the refreshing circuit, it's slower (because read cycles must be synched in time with refresh cycles), and is found in the "RAM" socket of your motherboard, in quantities in the range from hundreds of Megabytes to Gigabytes.

So, DRAM _really_ clears, i.e., if unplugged when plugged again it's all beautifully zeroed.

Ok??

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[trolltalk.com]

When I was a kid, RAM was made of flip-flops and I had to go to school with three feet of snow, and it was uphill both ways. Oh boy.

You were lucky - you had a supply of cheap beach sandals! We had to make our bits out of acorns. Our computers would crash every fall when the squirrels would bury all our RAM.

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[ScriptedReplay]

Why sonny, count yer blessings. Them acorn-based computers crashed only once a year. We didn't have no acorns so we had to make do with bundles of straw - upright was 1 and tumbled was 0. And the memory bus was rock-based - we threw rocks to flip them bits, and let me tell ya, it was SLOW to flip 'em back to 1. Then rain would get the straw all soggy and zero 'em bits so we'd have to hack'em open and spred 'em in the sun to dry. And we'd have to rebuild them computers daily anyway, 'cause in the morning sheep would pass through the field and the blasted rams would eat at the memory.

I'd still use one even now, for ol'times' sake, 'cause my lawn gets so little rain these days, but the damn kids are worse than the rams. And I thought about using them kids instead, but my son's lawyer advised me against it. So I have to make do with flipping 'em the bird instead.

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[OldManAndTheC]

We didn't have no acorns so we had to make do with bundles of straw - upright was 1 and tumbled was 0.

Whoa, whoa ... you had ones and zeros?!?!

Luxury!

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[Anonymous Coward]

You had 0's? In my day, all we had were 1's. Can you imagine how hard it was to create a program with only 1's? Not to mention that it required thousands of slaves hauling ton after ton of quarried stone to build a pyramid (how we represented the 1)...

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[shark72]

You had 1s? We had to use the letter "I".

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

...the blasted rams would eat at the memory. You had things eating away at the memory? It must not have been that long ago if you were running windows!

*rimshot*

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[BigAssRat]

cause in the morning sheep would pass through the field and the blasted rams would eat at the memory. And hence to honor these ancient machines, we still use the term RAM today.

Why is this so difficult?

[HangingChad]

Just put the RAM in the internet tubes and let the trucks take it over to where it's going and drop it off.

You guys always complicate this technical stuff so much.

Perception

[tyrantking31]

The problem the judge has in this case is perception. The plaintiff's are arguing that there is a way for the defendant to create a tangible record of the contents of their RAM which the defendant is obligated to produce under the rules of evidence. The defendant, in trying to educate the judge as to the nature of RAM is perceived as hiding something. The judge is forced either through her own ignorance or through defense council's incompetence to order the production of the information. It's unfortunate, but probably the correct decision if the judged thought that the defendant was hiding discoverable information. Thankfully there is an appeal and perhaps the appellate attorneys will be more competent or the judge will be more open receptive.

I see this as net positive.

[JRHelgeson]

While industry experts lamented the judges decision in this case, this newest revelation, that computer RAM should be turned over as part of discovery, proves that she has no concept of the issues she is addressing in her court. This provides fertile grounds for appeals as she is obviously dealing with issues she cannot even comprehend.

The fact that she has ordered the defendant to CREATE evidence (log files), in order to turn it over to the plaintiff as part of their discovery request is absurd.

Re:I see this as net positive.

[dissy]

The fact that she has ordered the defendant to CREATE evidence (log files), in order to turn it over to the plaintiff as part of their discovery request is absurd.

No thank you your honour, my server and I both plead the 5th.
One can't be forced to encriminate themself, so this order doesn't need to be followed, by law (A law a tad higher ranked than anything this judge can create atleast.)

Re:I see this as net positive.

[bcattwoo]

You can't be compelled to testify against yourself. You can however be compelled to turn over self-incriminating evidence.

Re:I see this as net positive.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is that they are requesting evidence that doesn't exist yet... so they want them to start logging IP addresses to a file (not handing over physical RAM or taking RAM snapshots every nanosecond). Great, but it won't log IP addresses from past occurrences, it will log IP addresses from FUTURE occurrences! That is just that: asking to produce evidence that doesn't exist yet.

Re:I see this as net positive.

[Anonymous Coward]

The argument is that they're not creating evidence, as it's already been created in RAM. The order is to transcribe already-created evidence in RAM to hard drive.

Re:I see this as net positive.

[JRHelgeson]

Respectfully, no. She quite literally demanded that the RAM be turned over as part of the discovery request. I've been having the same cognitive dissonance myself where I tried interpreting her order or reframing it until I could make sense of it... and theres the rub: As a Judge, you are required to speak with clarity, to issue orders such that there are no questions, no ambiguity (ever heard the term sober as a judge?). This is because every decision you are making in your courtroom, you are establishing case law, you are setting a precedent that future jurists will refer back to in order to support their requests for defendants to... turn over their RAM?

Uh, your honor, your ignorance is showing...

She had better correct her ruling or an appellate court will be forced to overturn her decision in order to avoid setting such a disastrous precedent.

Re:I see this as net positive.

[Snaller]

"Respectfully, no. She quite literally demanded that the RAM be turned over as part of the discovery request."

Nonsense, read the ruling. What AC (and others here) have said is what happened, if the information has been in the ram then it has been within your power to store it and you can be ordered to do so. That's what she ruled. Not they hand over some hardware.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[servognome]

The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced.

I would say the meatspace equivalent is to take crimescene photographs. There may or may not be something there, but at least you've taken a "snapshot" so that the information isn't lost over time

Ruling makes sense

[Have Blue]

The judge didn't get the technical aspects wrong. The judge did not take technical aspects into account at all, since it's a legal decision. The finding was that the contents of a computer's memory - specifically, the persistence of a client's IP in the network stack or server software while transmitting data - was relevant to the case and it should be provided to the court. In other words, TorrentSpy's loophole of not logging anything to disk is not valid and is no different legally from creating and then deleting logfiles. Once that decision has been made, the technical aspect is someone else's problem (TorrentSpy's).

(IANAL)

Re:Ruling makes sense

[DigiShaman]

The way I see it, TorrentSpy has only one option. That is to perform a memory dump to a file, burn it to DVD, and turn it over.

Question: If the OS already purged the IP information from RAM, who is held responsible for the destruction of the data? Maybe the judge should be informed that all data in RAM is subject to change without the users direct oversight. Basically, all that data could have been purged withen microseconds the moment TorrentSpy was issued the court order. Obviously this doesn't give you enought time to react.

Re:Ruling makes sense

[CaptainCarrot]

It makes technical sense, sure. But it makes no sense at all in terms of civil liberties. The reactions to the ruling described in TFA indicate that the judge did not distinguish between information that might be logged as a matter of course in normal IT practice and other information. So according to this judge, *anything* that passes through your computer's RAM is legally a "document" and can therefore be preserved by court order. This could potentially include anything from keystrokes during gameplay, to a calculation you performed with a "calculator" program, to a letter you wrote but decided not to save. That's more than a little disturbing.

Huh? How are they subject to U.S. law?

[WidescreenFreak]

Wait ... I'm really confused here. According to DNS records, TorrentSpy is in Holland. Last I checked, Holland is not a U.S. state or protectorate. Does this magistrate really expect TorrentSpy to hand over anything just because she says so? As much as I am against illegal downloading, in this case I really hope that the TorrentSpy guys give her the old Cartman line about making pies in the kitchen. This kind of arrogance from the judiciary that people in other countries are supposed to quake if they do something that is otherwise illegal here in the States really needs to stop.

(Sorry if this was already asked, but I didn't see it in the thread.)

Copyright Infringment is next

[Nymz]

If they legally consider anything held in RAM to be a valid copy, then any file of a song or movie passing into the memory chips would be an illegal copy. If not, then one day when RAM is cheaper someone could simply store everything in non-violtile RAM without fear of prosecution.

Re:Copyright Infringment is next

[cpt kangarooski]

Actually, that happened ages ago. Check out MAI v. Peak.

Re:Copyright Infringment is next

[Anonymous Coward]

or you could actually buy music and movies you want. had that option EVER occured to you?

Re:Copyright Infringment is next

[Nymz]

or you could actually buy music and movies you want. had that option EVER occured to you?

I wasn't suggesting to not buy music and movies, I was providing an example that demonstrated the possible progression of this ruling. I suppose someone could buy that much RAM today, but it would be expensive.

Re:Copyright Infringment is next

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I used to buy lots of music when I was 14. Now, 10 years later, I download it all.

Re:Copyright Infringment is next

[Bishop]

This is the exact sort of reasoning that has lead to software EULAs. The idea is that in order for a piece of software to be used it needs to be "copied" from floppy, tape, or harddrive into memory. Strictly speaking copyright law did not allow this copying. Only the copyright owner is allowed to make copies. Other parties, e.g. the users, are not allowed to make copies unless the copyright owner grants the other party a copyright license. The software makers saw the benefit of forcing licenses and used this legal requirement as an excuse for writing overreaching EULAs. A more sane approach would have been to extend "fair use."

the D in DRAM

[whoever57]

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basicly a capacitor.

That's what the "D" in DRAM means: dynamic, as opposed to SRAM, which does not require refreshing and in therefore static. However, in both cases, power is stil required to continue storing the state.

Re:the D in DRAM

[BosstonesOwn]

Your not reading the "state" of the bit at all , but the damage the flow of electricity is doing to the oxide on the chip itself.

When the bit changes if its not changed long enough it leaves traces that can be read on the memory chip itself.

Re:the D in DRAM

[Twanfox]

How do you figure that works? Is this a cumulative damage or is it reversible? Where is the research that shows this type of forensic investigation has any merit and... how do you suppose you even expose the gates themselves to read the oxidation? Besides, unless I miss my guess, aren't modern IC chips basically sealed without oxygen once the heat sink cover is put on, rendering the capacity to oxidize kind of minimal?

Something smells fishy in your understanding.

Re:the D in DRAM

[norminator]

That doesn't make any sense... the only thing that "the damage the flow of electricity is doing to the oxide" could possibly tell you would be the average state of that bit over the working life of the chip, not the last state, and even that is a stretch. Any physical damage that could possibly have been done to the chip would have been going on and off since the chip was first powered up. There's no way to tell from looking at the chip later what the last state of each bit was. Once the capacitors drain, which would happen pretty quickly once the chip is removed from the motherboard, there's no telling what the last state was.

In any case, I'm guessing that the judge in this case wasn't thinking of any type of major forensics investigation to get at the relevant information... TFA seems to indicate that this isn't so much about turning over the physical RAM chips so much as about keeping a log of everyting that gets stored in RAM. As one analyst quoted in TFA pointed out, the judge just doesn't have a technical understanding of how much data that would be. Also, it would be hugely impractical (even if it were technically feasible) to expect people to keep such a log and hand it over when requested. It's like saying you're not legally allowed to delete e-mails or erase your web browsing history.

From a feasibility standpoint, there's more simple logs they could try to force TorrentSpy to keep. I don't consider this judgement to be such a huge danger to privacy, it's more newsworthy to me because the judge made a ruling that can't be practically applied, in any way whatsoever. The part that's really about privacy is what the MPAA is really after, which is logs of who is connecting to the torrent servers. They're pretty stupid if they don't realize there's easier (but still just as stupid) things they could try to force the servers to log.

Re:the D in DRAM

[BosstonesOwn]

to avoid redundant modding here is a link to the /. post concerning it.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238463&cid =19509945

Re:the D in DRAM

[enjerth]

From the sounds of it, that's more likely to result in the telling of the age or the high use of the chip, having very little to do with what information was last contained on the chip.

That's like looking at a dirt road and trying to identify what vehicle last drove on that surface. Successfully repeat that 7 times and you've recovered a full byte!

Re:the D in DRAM

[josephdrivein]

I agree with you. The parent has misunderstood something, I think it should be apparent from the article he linked to. I didn't read it, this is /. :)

First of all, nowadays dynamic RAM doesn't even have a real capacitor for each bit, but it uses wires as (real small but cheap) capacitors. The capacitors are so small that when the RAM reads a bit it is destroyed, each time something is read, it has to be rewritten too. The reading circuit ensures this.
Because of leakage, they have to be refreshed thousands of times a second, or charge (and information) would be lost.

Add to all that the fact that a forensic method that tries to read very small charges on the storage nodes once the RAM is powered down, would require that the chip is open, some metalization is taken off and some really clever way to read terribly small charges is implemented _off-chip_. The wires you need to contact are something like 200nm away from each other.

I think it's not possible.

Re:the D in DRAM

[TheGavster]

CMOS devices (as used in most modern computer chips) are built around a thin layer of oxide insulating the gate from the source and drain. There are also oxide regions isolating devices from one another on the substrate. That said, I'm not sure what sort of state the oxides maintain that the rest of the device does not.

Re:the D in DRAM

[mollymoo]

I agree with you. The parent has misunderstood something, I think it should be apparent from the article he linked to. I didn't read it, this is /. :)

You really should try reading the article, because you wouldn't look like such an idiot if you did. You might even be able to add something to the discussion other than ill-informed noise. Slashdot may be full of morons who are proud of the fact that they feel qualified to comment on articles without even reading them, but that's no reason for you to be one of those morons too. Here's a little taster for you:

DRAM can also "remember" the last stored state, but in a slightly different way. It isn't so much that the charge (in the sense of a voltage appearing across a capacitance) is retained by the RAM cells, but that the thin oxide which forms the storage capacitor dielectric is highly stressed by the applied field, or is not stressed by the field, so that the properties of the oxide change slightly depending on the state of the data.

Read section 7 of this then come back when you have something intelligent to add.

Re:the D in DRAM

[Fordiman]

"Your not reading the "state" of the bit at all , but the damage the flow of electricity is doing to the oxide on the chip itself."

>.- (brain snap)

Wow. HUGE misunderstanding of how RAM works.

In DRAM, each bit is stored in a capacitor, which needs continuously refreshed (ie: rewritten). In SRAM, each bit is stored in a nifty little transistor/capacitor array, just just needs continuously powered.

I don't know where this oxide damage nonsense comes from, but... wow.

Anyway, this is all academic and based on a bigger misunderstanding by the judge; see, even if their RAM chips were in some way non-volitile (flash, EEPROM, something else unreasonably expensive, short-lived, slow, and generally better suited as portable harddrives and settings holders), they'd only have that nanosecond's connection information - hardly a 'log' of any sort.

Yep. Just ship those babies over.

[jpellino]

Make sure you pack the RAM in those tiny styrofoam loose beads - that should keep the delicate pins from being bent.

This reminds me of Steve Roberts' story about setting up a web storefront for his nomadness stuff. He tried to explain to the bank who handled the merchant account what they were doing - selling things on web pages. The bank person asked if he could fax all those pages over to them so they could understand what he was doing.

Jacqueline Chooljian

[krappie]

First she wants server logs given to the RIAA and now this? What the hell is wrong with this judge Jacqueline Chooljian?! She needs to be barred from dealing with any technical decisions from now on. What can we do to stop her?

Astounding.

[Revotron]

I've always wanted to know... how do you plug a keyboard into a hard drive? Please, inform us of your ways, oh technical one!

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[TheRaven64]

Most operating systems allow you to encrypt swap space, with a key that is stored in RAM, so whenever the RAM is cleared the swap is effectively cleared as well (not actually cleared, but its contents become random data without the key). With non-volatile RAM, you could put a crypto coprocessor in the memory controller, and do the same thing; decrypt the data whenever it was loaded into cache, and encrypt it whenever it was flushed back out.

A Good Thing

[ratboy666]

I am sure that there will be a lot of "snicker" replies -- how can the magistrate be so stupid...

But this is an interesting idea. RAM holds information, specifically the IP addresses in this case.

"Sorry, we don't have the IP address available; they are never recorded". To which the reply is: "They ARE recorded. In RAM. So copy RAM".

Why this is a useful result: It means that it *could* become illegal to build a computer that has "unreadable" memory, because *that* memory may be where information needed by a court is being kept, and it needs copying.

Which means that "secure writeable storage" for DRM becomes illegal (at least on computers).

But, back to the topic, the magistrate is dead on. Of course, the RAM could simply be dumped onto a hard disks, lather, rinse, repeat. I don't think INTERPRETATION of the document was discussed!

Oh Bovine Magistrate!

[Etherwalk]

> if he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle

Yeah, he really needs to learn how to milk his tech witnesses better.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[redelm]

Crimescene photos are criminal, not civil. If this case were criminal, the cops could get a warrent and wiretap [sniff] the traffic. Which is probably how this really should proceed.

This is ordering a civil defendant to do cumbersome things they wouldn't ordinarily do to help the plaintiff. Unwarrented intrusion.

But bad facts make bad law.

Well, fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Offcourse slashdot got it wrong, the judge is NOT asking for the ram itself magically believing it to keep its data when removed.

She is asking instead for torrentspy to save the contents of its servers memory during operation to make up for the lack of logs.

Mmm, okay. Do just that. Read up on a think called civil disobedience. Follow her ruling to the letter. Backup ALL your computers memory every time a single bit changes and sent it to the court to figure out. When they receive the 100th HD stuffed with random noise from the bootup they might get the message.

It is an intresting idea and was bound to happen in the endless battle for control of copyrighted materials. A common suggestion to prevent courts from finding out what happened on your servers has been to simple not enable log files. No logs, nothing to present in court.

The torrentspy case is however different, this isn't about what has happened, this is about what is going to happen. In essence the court is asking torrentspy to install camera's to catch wrongdoers.

This goes one step beyond the tactic of monitoring filesharing networks by asking the network to do it themselves with a court order. A copyright enforcers wetdream. Oh, a tip to the clueless, do NOT use torrentspy for sharing contents that you are not allowed to in politicians for hire countries.

I think this courtcase is going to raise some very intresting questions and not ones the copyright enforces might like. They might think they have a very powerfull tool but this also starts to smell an awfull lot like entrapment and wiretapping. Not all torrents are illegal and not all torrents exist in the US of A. Sue the wrong person because of this and they might just find themselves sued for invasion of privacy by a user who has nothing to hide.

Mandatory logging

[zerofoo]

Courts are trying force administrators of systems that do not log activities to start keeping logs.

There are many problems with this:

Technical: RAM contents are not permanently stored due to the technical nature of RAM. This judge wants to change that.....essentially storing everything that passes through RAM.

Cost: Why should the owners and operators of systems bear the cost of copyright enforcement? As a system administrator, what do I gain by spending my company's money on lots of disk and tape to keep logs for the RIAA? Why is that my responsibility?

Responsible party: If my users agree to only use my systems for legal purposes and they break that agreement, why am I required to provide anything to any third party? If they violate my TOS, I should be able to kick them off my network. The RIAA and their civil case should not involve me or my network. Their gripe is with the end user. If they need my help to pursue their case, then they don't have much of a case.

SARBOX forces companies to keep all emails and IM records as potential evidence. What's next? Recording every spoken word just in case someone needs it in court?

The burden of proof should be on the accuser - not on the accused.

-ted

Re:Mandatory logging

[thePsychologist]

"essentially storing everything that passes through RAM."

You know, that's impossible. No one has enough space for that.

Re:Mandatory logging

[nege]

thank you finally a reasonable summary of the major concerns here.

Re:Mandatory logging

[RancidPickle]

Well said. Perhaps it's time to invest in Seagate and Western Digital.

If they want the RAM dump, one could just dump the binary to a 50,000-page Word document with 6-point font and hand that in. Not overly useful, but does fit with the draconian requirement to create documents of all RAM states.

And you thought Windows was slow now... just wait until you have to dump every RAM state every 64ms.

Re:Mandatory logging

[P. Legba]

Of course, in certain situations, such as official proceedings of our government, that is exactly what should happen. Every spoken word recorded as potential evidence. Preferrably, committee proceedings and the like should be recorded and published to the Internet in the interest of public interest.

Far different in the private sector, however. Not sure Sarbanes-Oxley applies there.

P.

Re:Mandatory logging

[danfromsb]

You bring up some very good points, especially the technical ones. The very purpose of RAM is to store information for a SHORT period of time. It is insane to record everything that is being swapped in and out of RAM.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[MightyMartian]

I would suspect that even with such a detection apparatus, you'd likely get back at best fragmented information, most likely just a bunch of garbage. In ten years, a judge making such a request may have a legitimate request, but right now on the vast majority of computers out there, it's idiotic. If ignorance is no excuse before the law, then it certainly can't be an excuse for the judge either.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[edwdig]

DRAM needs to be refreshed many times per second or it loses its contents.

Not sure the interval between refreshes, but it's probably in the order of hundreds or even thousands of times per second.

By the time you get the RAM out of the socket, the contents are long, long gone.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[ultranova]

You'd want to add a switch that could purge the RAM in case you needed to restart from a crash, though.

Why ? All you have to do is reset the program counter so it starts again from ROM - if your bootloader/OS/programs use memory uninitialized, they're going to fail even with volatile RAM. And since the the program counter is in the CPU, and gets reset when the CPU powers up, everything will work just fine as-is.

hmm.. would that be ...

[josepha48]

... before or after it gets mysterioously hit with a hammer a few times? ..lol..

Re:hmm.. would that be ...

[pb186]

mysteri 0_0 usly

too bad for them...

[Anonymous Coward]

... if they hadn't chosen a mauve database, they would have less RAM to turn over.

Re:And By The Way

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad your karma is bad, thats pretty funny...

Irrelevant but necessary

[BForrester]

I think I cited a magistrate judge once, across the street. She cited me too. It was a powerful, if brief connection -- then it was gone.

just do it

[sumac]

Since we suspect you used your car to commit this crime, send us the spark from your spark plugs for examination.

oooook

[pak9rabid]

Uh, ok. Do they plan on keeping the RAM modules powered up? If so, they might as well turn in a rock, as it'd be just as useful to them.

Not correct

[tkrotchko]

"It goes away when the power goes out, but it can be read -- and memorized -- by anyone on that system."

In any modern operating system a basic principle is you can only get to the process space that you own. In fact, even if you are the owner of a process, you cannot readily read the contents of RAM without specialized debugging software.

What this means in practice on a large server is that you can't get to someone else's memory space (or the contents of that space) unless you are the superuser of that system.

Yes! Turn over the RAM!

[synthespian]

Yes! Turn over the RAM!

All your RAM are belong to us!

It's not clear how

[tkrotchko]

"Taking a copy of a computer's RAM, which is technically possible in a running computer using, say and external hard drive, by order of a court, is a very real possibility,"

I don't see how, given today's state of the art. You'd have to somehow halt the processor so it couldn't change memory, and then have a device to walk memory and save it to another system. The act of reading the memory from the same system changes the contents of memory.

And since the contents of memory changes millions of times a second, "when" would you capture memory?

Yet you guys supported the DOJ going after MS

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is exactly why slashdotters shouldn't rush to the courts to deal with Microsoft either. The judge in the MS/DOJ case was incompetent both legally and technologically (the latter can't even be disputed by even the most ardent Microsoft hater).

Well, they were obviously computer illiterate

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that the TV looking thing is the computer and the beige box is the hard drive.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Myopic]

It may be outrageous, but it isn't unbelievable; and if you've never heard of imposing a requirement to make new documents, then you don't pay attention to the law.

Which is okay, you don't have to pay attention to how fucked up the law is, to be outraged by it.

You're confusing volatile memory with flash.

[Ayanami Rei]

SRAM works via flip flops (look it up). They're power hungry but very fast. Remove power, and all the state is lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:6t-SRAM-cell.pn g

In fact such cells have 4 states, but only two are valid states (which encode 0 and 1). The other two states are unstable and decay to the 0 and 1 states, except the 0/0 state which is stable when you remove the power :-)

In any case, there's no way to retrieve information from them.

Re:You're confusing volatile memory with flash.

[samjam]

SRAM is not power hungry, it is very VERY low power, but bulky (and expensive) because of the number of transistors required to make a cell (6 in your diagram).

SRAM is based on FET which have exceedingly low leakage current, SRAM do not use resistors, and noticable current does not flow except during a switchover.

DRAM is smaller, simpler and power hungry BECAUSE of all the refresh's required.

Sam

This is eroding our civil liberties

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if one is firmly in favor of the rights of copyright holders, one must accept that copyright holders do not in any way have the legal or ethical right to destroy those personal rights which lie outside the scope of copyright, and I feel that's what is happening.

No matter what one's viewpoint on the copyright issue may be, it's self-evident that these organizations' attempts to enforce copyright through the courts and through new legislation are eroding our civil liberties. This is beyond the pale, and it must be stopped.

Not a new document

[SuperKendall]

Read again, the argument is that the contents of RAM are effectively a document, and the order is to retain that document instead of discard it.

Sounds reasonable to me, even if technically impractical (you can't realistically store every change to memory).

Re:Not a new document

[rthille]

If RAM is a document, so is the contents of cache and CPU registers. Record those too while you're at it. Oh, you can't record those with the computer you've got? Well, just have intel develop new ones that will write everything out the JTAG (or some new) port.

Requiring torrentspy to develop software to record the data to permanent storage is different only in scale & scope. If RAM is a document, so is a phone call, and so companies should be required to record every call.

Re:Not a new document

[Anonymous Coward]

If RAM is a document, so is a phone call, and so companies should be required to record every call.

This is the huge implication. Every phone call passing through a modern PBX is "recorded" to RAM. Consequently, under this interpretation, every organization using any form of digital telephony and every person using a modern cell phone is almost certainly guilty of illegal wiretapping.

Re:Not a new document

[bcattwoo]

The judges order does not require them to record every change to the memory. It merely says that they have to record the "Server Log Data", which will apparently consist of maybe a Gigabyte of data a day.

Re:Not a new document

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the only reasonable thing to do here is to get a few good old boys together, find that judge and drag him kicking and screaming into the woods and string him up. And if he has any kids they can come to.

Stupidity like that shouldn't be allowed to breed.

Heisenberg and Lawsuits...

[Glove d'OJ]

Trying to document or preserve RAM contents in aggregate is subject to an analog of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle -- if we try to read it, we change it. Running the program to copy a segment of RAM takes up space somewhere in RAM, changing it. How can we accurately capture a RAM dump at any point in time -- by definition, it would have to include the addresses of the RAM dump program as it traverses all of the addresses, thus proving it is not an accurate capture of the state of the machine BEFORE WE RAN THE DUM PROGRAM.

Ugh.

Additionally, who do we want to sue to run them out of business? That is, if I don't like company X, I can sue them and force them to record every byte of RAM over time. This would take oodles and oodles of storage, dollars that not many companies -- even Micro$oft -- could afford (if applied to enough servers...)

Dumbasses.

Re:Heisenberg and Lawsuits...

[Anonymous Coward]

Schrodinger's Fridge

Re:Heisenberg and Lawsuits...

[Loconut1389]

You'd have to make a co-chip to the ram that can peek in on the state- or just make two ram sticks, during non-forensic mode, both copies are updated on write, and during forensic mode they can be addressed separately for reading.. so your program would run in the regular ram and would read the copy ram. This still doesn't take into account program state, cpu registers, stack pointer, instruction pointer, etc, and you still would have no real idea what that snapshot was really saying.

RAM as document vs logging

[orb_fan]

After reading the article, I don't see how this order can stand (IANAL). She ruled that RAM is an electronic document as as such Torrent Spy must turn on logging - but that would be two separate issues. If the RAM is an electronic document, then she might be able to tell TS to create a file containing every change to the RAM as that would represent the "contents of the document". Her telling them to turn on logging is asking them to create a *NEW* document as part of discovery, which I'm fairly certain is not allowed.

Can a judge make you create a new document based on existing, if fleeting, data? I had assumed that you could only be ordered to hand over the data itself. For example, if you have a database, you can be ordered to hand over the data files and not a new report based off the data. Maybe one of you lawyerly types out there can answer this.

As others have said

[Loconut1389]

The burden should be on the accusers to come up with the evidence through trained individuals in law enforcement. If I get sued/arrested, you can bet your ass I don't trust Mediacom/Comcast/MaCableCo to keep perfectly accurate/unaltered logs. I don't necessarily implicitly trust the government's snooping ability either, but I'm at least willing to take their word for it.

The more you make companies do, the less likely they're going to do it well. In the end, the consumer and the company get screwed.

I epsecially like this jewel...

[Valdez]

(Lauren Nguyen an MPAA attorney) also said that the judge "broke no new ground in the case." The courts have long considered computer RAM as "electronically stored information," she said.

That's like calling a wheelbarrow "physically stored dirt". The RAM isn't the information, it's the container for the information...

Read the judgement

[cyberianpan]

since RAM must be slowed to be recorded On page 3 it says

4) Defendants have failed to demonstrate that the preservation & production of such data is unduly burdensome, or that the other reasons they articulate justify the ongoing failure to preserve and produce such data

They failed to make that case & I doubt they could.

Whilst ephemeral, data is being captured in RAM - to maintain a session of course they've to identify the IP. It isn't really all that hard to write that data to disk. Ok the logfiles would be a few GB a day - from technical viewpoint the judge's request is reasonable.

Re:Read the judgement

[jedidiah]

Basically, we've just got a judge that doesn't care what the practical impact of her demands are. That's not surprising really. Fortunately, this is so egregious and far reaching that someone like Citibank will buy an exception to this, write it into law and possibly even have an insult to the judge written in there for spite.

Compared to the sort of trouble this could make in compliance terms, it's a minor nuissance in this case.

Yes, there is a level of pain far beyond "horribly bad".

Re:Read the judgement

[redelm]

RAM is written at speeds in excess of 1 GB/s. Disk
has trouble beyond 30 MB/s. It cannot possibly keep up with all writes. The best that could be hoped for is occasional (every minute) snapshots. Even that will tie-up disk for 30 seconds doing the dump.

Re:Read the judgement

[cyberianpan]

We're not talking theoretical computer science here. Not dumping out a whole RAM snapshot. Just some specific logical session identifiers from the application level area. Only a small portion of what passes through RAM would need to be written- as the judge said they hadn't proved it an undue burden.

Re:Read the judgement

[Anonymous Coward]

technical viewpoint the judge's request is reasonable.

So then the judge's request isn't "hand over the RAM", it's "you are able to log the information therefore you must start doing it".

Re:Read the judgement

[jonbryce]

Well look at it this way. How much slower would your computer be if you had the absolute bear minimum ram needed to boot the machine, and used swap for everything else. That's how much complying with this request would slow things down.

Re:Read the judgement

[cyberianpan]

bear minimum ram needed to boot the machine, and used swap for everything else no ! I'm presuming that they've written some custom code to manage the user download session. All that the judge appears to be looking for is just the header information for the session. This would be a miniscule proportion of the throughput. The judge is not looking for a whole RAM dump, she's just noted that the info she wants is actually captured at the moment in RAM.

Re:Read the judgement

[The_Wilschon]

Apache is capable of writing logs to disk, without causing the sorts of problems you are talking about. This is all the judge is asking for, not the entire contents of RAM at all times. She is saying "You have the needed (and relatively small in size) information at one point in time, so while you've got it, write it to a persistent record." Not "Every bit that changes in your RAM must be recorded". If Apache can write logs, then Torrentspy can write logs containing very similar information, too.

Re:Read the judgement

[redelm]

Beyond the question of whether a court has the right to demand changes to a vital set of machine instructions to produce documentation, such evidence would obviously be new.

Such new evidence might indicate wrongdoing at this future time, but cannot prove what the suit alleges -- past wrongdoing!

So is irrelevant.

Re:Read the judgement

[ozbird]

0xdeadbeef, 0xdeadbeef, 0xdeadbeef ...

Re:Read the judgement

[jonbryce]

She's specifically not asking for that, as that would be requesting the creation of a new document, and they can't do that.

She is saying that the contents of the RAM are an already existing document, and therefore it must be produced to court.

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[magarity]

remove the RAM with out turning off the machine
 
Depending on how much you paid for your server you actually can remove an entire bank's worth of RAM from some higher end models. You could hand over a small handful of modules from a still running and perfectly functioning server.

Hearsay

[astra05]

Eventually If everything is logged, when does information become hearsay? I mean it plausible that a sysadmin is breaking the logs with bad information. Bah

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[arborlaw]

Agreed. We've been here before.....

The SonicBlue / ReplayTV case in 2002 involved an order by the court to ReplayTV to create the technology to record information about subscribers for purposes of determining how much usage was violating the TOS and the law.

From the defendant's brief in that case, which makes it quite clear that the information does not exist and would involve an affirmative duty to surveil:

Federal Rule 34 Neither Requires Nor Authorizes An Order To Create Records That Do Not Exist.

Not surprisingly, Plaintiffs cite no authority for such an order. It is well settled that a party is not required to create, either in paper or electronic form, data that does not currently exist within its possession. Steil v. Humana Kansas City, Inc., 197 F.R.D. 445, 448 (D. Kan. 2000) (party "cannot be compelled to produce documents which do not exist" ). Rule 34 "only requires a party to produce documents that are already in existence." Alexander v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 194 F.R.D. 305, 310 (D.D.C. 2000) (emphasis added). "A party is not required 'to prepare, or cause to be prepared,' new documents solely for their production." Id. Plaintiffs misunderstand Rule 34 and the law relating to the discovery of data compilations. It is true that Defendants may be required to produce both hard copy documents, and electronic data, that are stored in Defendants' own files and computers. But, with the sole exception of the limited my.ReplayTV.com information discussed below, the information sought by Plaintiffs is not "electronically stored" on Defendants' computers. It does not exist anywhere yet. It does not even exist on individual consumers' PVR hard drives, much less on Defendants' computers. And if the information is created, and a program written to log it in the future, it would exist on a consumer's personal property, not on ReplayTV's computers.

Rather, Plaintiffs are asking the Court to order Defendants first to write a program to implant in a consumer's ReplayTV unit in order to create and store the data, and then to write software to collect the data from consumers (without further notice to them) and disclose it to Plaintiffs. Neither Rule 34 nor case law obliges Defendants to take these extraordinary steps.

--originally provided by Mike Godwin in SonicBlue discussion, Cyberia-L

Actually, it makes perfect sense

[smchris]

At least I think I know what precedent they are hoping to set. A forensic technician in a raid wouldn't power down the computer because there might be something worthwhile in the ram, right? So the judge is saying, you power down in an investigative situation, you are de facto interfering with an investigation. Hey, prove you _weren't_.

Just another judgment along the line of, "Citizen if you have nothing to hide, you will cooperate."

Re:Actually, it makes perfect sense

[frisket]

"Oops, my foot caught in the power cord, I'm sooooooo sorry...just one of those accidents..."

missing the point

[coyote-san]

And I thought nobody would be so techno-centric that they would miss the point.... (Yes, I did debate making this explicit but thought it would just confuse most people.)

I was referring to somebody shoulder surfing, not somebody sneaking around in /dev/kmem. If you're in a commercial for a 'privacy filter' it could even be somebody at the next table or beside you on a flight. Literally anyone able to read the words could memorize them and share them with others even if you never put the words on disk or paper.

No dumbfuck

[dharbee]

"Guess I expect to much of people to read links off of an article they obviously haven't seen before. Just keep modding them redundant because people are lazy."

It gets modded redundant because you keep posting it.

From Dictionary.com
"redundant
-adjective
1. characterized by verbosity or unnecessary repetition in expressing ideas;"

So that's why you're wrong about that.

Also, I'd reread your article. It doesn't say what you think it does.

Downloading .torrents not illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

TorrentSpy doesn't run a tracker, they link to .torrent files. Downloading a .torrent file is not illegal and the act of downloading it does not constitute copyright infringement. Who is to say I'm not a P2P researcher who downloaded all the .torrents for studying and never even connected to a tracker, much less shared any information? I don't see how getting all these IPs will help in the case.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[AK Marc]

Exactly like that, except, you are told that your house could have been, is, or could be a crime scene, so you are required to take one photo of every room every, say, 10 seconds and produce them up to 7 years later if so asked. Say you have 10 rooms in your house, when you do the math that's about 220 million photographs you must take at your time and cost and produce for the court. It's no big deal, it's just a "snapshot" so that the information isn't lost over time...

Just to be safe

[kc7cfk]

They probably had the lights on at the time as well. Better send her the light bulbs too.

Compare and Contrast

[Kaenneth]

How does this differ from Microsoft (and other corporations) being required to retain e-mail logs?

It's not uncommon for a court to order data retention.

RTFD

[Anonymous Coward]

You have been misinformed if you take the slashdot summary at face value.

And you have been misinformed if you RTFA.

The judge's decisions responds to most of the comments posted here, and the lawyers comments naively repeated by the author of the article.

Instead, read the decision (RTFD) that the article links to.

Although she mistakenly says websites have RAM, she definitely knows what RAM is, if you read her analysis about why the RAM should be turned over. She doesn't want the chip, she wants the ip address that temporarily pass through the website server's RAM.

Based on existing case law from other copyright cases, whatever passes through a computer's RAM is a tangible copy, if only a temporarily one. According to the rules of discovery, the defendant must produce this copy because it is within their control. It is within their control due to the fact their provider uses the a web server (Microsoft's), and this server has the capability of logging ip address that temporarily pass through the computers RAM.

So "turning over the RAM" actually means "hand over the documents that are temporarily stored in the RAM by simply turning on the logging function of the webserver." The judge is simply following existing case law and discovery procedures.

Re:RTFD

[kaizokuace]

yea but who is gonna dish out the cash for disk space? It's not fair to make torrentspy pay because they aren't committing a crime. It is just believed that their users are. Safe harbor? I dunno, I hate this crap.

Re:RTFD

[aeschenkarnos]

Although she mistakenly says websites have RAM, she definitely knows what RAM is

Sorry, my cognitivance is dissonating. Could you repeat that, please?

So "turning over the RAM" actually means "hand over the documents that are temporarily stored in the RAM by simply turning on the logging function of the webserver."

The core of the problem is that 1G of RAM inside a computer changes, thousands of times per second. The only way to show a complete record of RAM state is to record an image of it, every single time. Unfortunately the very process of reading from RAM affects RAM state. The court is asking the impossible.

They may actually mean "keep logs of IPs involved in torrents", but that's not what they're asking. They're asking "record RAM", and that is impossible.

6 Hours?

[whoever57]

One of the articles states that the data is held in RAM for 6 hours. This seems rather long. Any thoughts?

Re:6 Hours?

[Kazoo the Clown]

So how long does it take to download a copyrighted major motion picture?

Re:6 Hours?

[whoever57]

So how long does it take to download a copyrighted major motion picture?

Yes, 6 hours connected to various peers, but does the client stay connected to the Torrent tracker for 6 hours?

Re:6 Hours?

[bynary]

Depending on how the software actually works, the IP address may or may not remain in memory for the duration of the download. Shoot, the IP address could be encrypted, stored in memory, and then unencrypted when needed by the software in which case it would not be useful to the court.

Re:6 Hours?

[Lehk228]

if they store the IP for bannings, a hashed IP would work just fine, and be useless in court, and encrypted IP just requires a subpoena of the key as well

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Col. Blackwolf]

While I object to some of the conclusions that the court has drawn in this particular case, I am far more concerned with the broader implications of the paragraph starting line 20 of page 24, referring to the the US Wiretap Act (18 U.S.C. 2510-22). "First, the court concludes that this statute is not implicated because, as to electronic communications, it only prohibits interceptions during transmission (not while in electronic storage, i.e. RAM), and the disclosure of electronic communications intercepted during transmission. See Konop v. Hawaiian Airlines, Inc.302 F.3d 868, 878-879 (9th Cir. 2002). This is true even though storage is a necessary incident to transmission." This is an explicit writ authorizing anyone the legal right to record any and all information that passes through the RAM on their computer. I.E. if I own webserver X, I am within my legal right to log all information, or a portion thereof, that passes through my system, by virtue that it will reside, however briefly, in that system's RAM. This includes data for which my server is not the intended recipient, as it has still been electronically stored on my system. For example, I could record the addresses of all emails that route through my server. And since this recording is my property, my consequent sale of said information to interested third parties is completely legal. This also means that any gov't agency that so desires this information can acquire it via a straightforward civil information discovery request, bypassing the more stringent requirements to obtain a valid wiretap warrant. The implications of this ruling for the future of data protection and security are frightening. While I am confident that it will be overturned or at least limited in the future, the potential for abuse is mind-boggling (like most things governments seems to do these days).

the intelligence of posters astounds!

[Anonymous Coward]

- 'udderly' indeed!

- how can anyone take anything on /. seriously when posters use such atrocious spelling and grammar?

Slashdot: Entertainment 24/7(TM)

Re:the intelligence of posters astounds!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anyone takes this site seriously. God, I hope not.

Re:the intelligence of posters astounds!

[Anonymous Coward]

- how can anyone take anything on /. seriously when posters use such atrocious spelling and grammar?

The first part of your sentence is going in the right direction. It could even be standalone!

The second part, which tries to explain it, fails. Miserably. Why would bad grammar and spelling lessen an argument? To start, remember that slashdot is read outside the English speaking world. Arguments can be rock solid, even if they are written in Engrish.
And off course, even for native english speakers, bad grammar and spelling doesn't automatically invalidate an argument.

Having said that, I must say I love the word "udderly". I must use it more often!
(My spell checker doesn't seem to like it however.)

Memory Dump

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory dump. Doesn't that do what they want?

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[Anonymous Coward]

You were proven wrong earlier, so just STFU already.

What use is it?

[phlegmofdiscontent]

So, people have established that this is basically an order to log the IP addresses. So what? They could prove that I grabbed a torrent file from TorrentSpy, but they can't really prove that I actually USED that torrent file. I could just leave it on my hard drive and look at it and it's not really infringing content. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?

Keyscrubbing.

[eddy]

See, this is why I run loop-AES with keyscrubbing. When they come for the RAM, there'll be nothing residual there. And people call me paranoid. Pffft.

(yes, I'm aware that's not what the order is about, but if they get the RAM, they can analyze it!)

Ahh, you kids!

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a young fellow we used tubes full of mercury with ultrasonic transducers on the ends. Of course you have to keep reading from one end and writing back into the other. There is some built in latency while you wait for the bit you want to read to reach the end of the tube.

Then we got core memory, little toroidal beads of ferrite strung on wires in multiple directions. Now they were non volatile, if the power went down they retained the current data and so you could do a core dump later. That was still in use when they built the shuttle. One feature with cores is that a read zeroes the bit, so you have to read then write back. I had a core memory board once, the ferrite cores were small enough to need a low power microscope to see them.

There was also magnetic drum memory, like hard drive but using multiple heads on a coated drum. Again there is latency while you wait for the right bit to reach the head, but again it is nonvolatile.

Bubble memory was another interesting one, I think I still have a board with 128k of that somewhere.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[HappyEngineer]

No, the equivalent of crimeschene photographs would be to copy their hard drives. What we're talking about here is the equivalent of requiring that they install a video camera at the location where the alleged crime occurred in the hopes that future crimes will be recorded.

Slashdot headline inaccurate

[kontos]

I know that it's hard to RTFA when the link is messed up, but http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3218 is pretty easy to find. It clearly states that the judge doesn't want the RAM turned over, but the data that is stored there.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Doctor Memory]

RAM must be slowed to be recorded Um....what? Recording IP addresses might affect your throughput, but it won't have any effect on your memory cycle time. Unless you're proposing using some kind of bus analyzer to capture every state change. Which (given the difficulty of reconstructing the data) would probably get you slapped with a contempt charge....

But that ruling is RETARDED

[Anonymous Coward]

Defendant: "But your Honor, I didn't write down the names of every customer who came into my shop to buy an ice cream cone. They always tell me their names, but its not as if I write them down!"

Magistrate: "Well your Memory is a legal document, therefore you should have written them down. I might worry about the privacy implications if I tried to buy an ice cream cone from you, but hey! Do I really deserve privacy if I'm committing a terrible crime??"

The ruling basically finds TorrentSpy guilty of not remembering a bunch of info about its past activities. Show me the fucking law that says they have to KEEP LOGS of their activities.

Land of the Free, my ass!

Re:Huh? How are they subject to U.S. law?

[bcattwoo]

The website is hosted in the Netherlands but it is U.S. citizens that are running it. Additionally, the main server offloads requests to other servers around the world, a number of which are located in the U.S. This has been going on for quite a while, so if TorrentSpy was going to argue jurisdiction, I think they would have done it already.

And that's not essentially wiretapping how?

[Namlak]

What's next, being ordered to "log" the electrical signals on your phone line?

Re:And that's not essentially wiretapping how?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's next, being ordered to "log" the electrical signals on your phone line?

Too late -- the current administration has already been proven to be doing exactly that on your behalf, as they desire and without your knowledge.

Don't forget the Intel L2 cache!!

[Glog]

We are gonna need that one too.

Re:Don't forget the Intel L2 cache!!

[Intrinsic]

Mod Parent UP: Funny as Hell :)

Encryption?

[Bryan_W]

That sucks that TorrentSpy now has to log everything but what if the RAM was encrypted?

"reasonable" ... in a world of morons, yes

[Anonymous Coward]

the judge's request is reasonable

It's people like you who have made the US such a laughing stock worldwide. Stupidity in law is universal, but only in the US does the citizenry seek to defend totally moronic legal requirements as "reasonable".

Do the IP's even go through ram?

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Unless your looking at them do they go through DMA? Do hops in a tracert get kept in ram if you don't run a tracert?

I find this very peculiar.

thinking about all this

[Loconut1389]

What if these kinds of sites started running on custom equipment that didn't have removeable ram chips and ran off a bootable ROM and did all the web transactions completely stateless? There'd literally be nothing to log, and nowhere to log it.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I've only read useing reverse-NAT'ing, i wonder what the ramifications would be if the torrent spy folks just happened to have one in front of their box?

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced.

I would say the meatspace equivalent is to take crimescene photographs. There may or may not be something there, but at least you've taken a "snapshot" so that the information isn't lost over time

What do we call it when we create many sequential "snapshots" of an activity, transaction or conversation? Hint: there are commonly available tools to take photographic snapshots at a rate of 24fps or to play back digital audio snapshots at a rate of 44.1kHz.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is well settled that a party is not required to create, either in paper or electronic form, data that does not currently exist within its possession. Steil v. Humana Kansas City, Inc., 197 F.R.D. 445, 448 (D. Kan. 2000)
But the argument is that the data does currently exist in their possession, labeit briefly in RAM.

(party "cannot be compelled to produce documents which do not exist" ). Rule 34 "only requires a party to produce documents that are already in existence." Alexander v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 194 F.R.D. 305, 310 (D.D.C. 2000) (emphasis added). "A party is not required 'to prepare, or cause to be prepared,' new documents solely for their production."

Of course, the obvious solution is that since they are asking for the documents as they exist in memory, (and no more can be asked to be prepared), they could pull an IBM and hand the court raw core dumps of the whole server taken once every second or as quickly as technically feasible. It is the job of the plaintiff to reverse engineer the IP addresses from there (and they don't have to turn over the source code). Throw in a bit of hashing and use linked lists instead of arrays and the game becomes fun.

And then sue the plaintiff for them to pay for the extra storage requirement.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[knowlton]

I've read recently (was it on /.?) that in order for 4th amendment protections to apply, there has to be a reasonable expectation of privacy.
When you send unencrypted bit streams over equipment that is owned by a third party, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

If you want to create a reasonable expectation of privacy, use a privacy envelope of some sort. E.g., PGP. Otherwise, the email you send has even less legal protection than snail mail. AS IT SHOULD BE.

you can have my ram

[TheGratefulNet]

but please don't ask for my screen phosphor.

(d'oh!)

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, submitting a digest of just the IP addresses would not come even close to satisfying the judges order. He was pretty explicit that (entire) RAM is a document which must be retained. If you were ordered to submit your bank records it is unlikely that the judge would accept the argument that you felt it was OK to destroy them since you kept a record of the locations of your ATM withdrawals.

Some other notes:

There is no legal requirement to maintain operational records in a format that the average lawyer can readily understand. Prescriptions, service records and inspection orders for example are routinely handwritten and rife with jargon and shorthand.

A judge may not order a company to create a new report or record. Existing records may be subpoenaed but this does not put the burden on the provider to do the prosecution's work for them.

The law distinguishes between complete records (such as wiretaps) and partial records (such as PEN registers). There is no legal requirement for software to maintain an IP register and the company has stated that they do not have that report. Since they cannot be ordered to create a new report, and the judge is presumably operating more or less within the law, it follows that the judge is ordering them to provide the existing "records": either the complete RAM image at every instant in time or the actual physical RAM.

Err....no.

[DeadCatX2]

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basically [sic] a capacitor.

Sure, forgetting about the whole row and column stuff, and the sense amps...

However, due to the natural resistance of silicon there is always some leakage current leaving the capacitors.

Incorrect. Capacitors lose charge because dielectrics are not perfect insulators, and thus some current actually leaks through from one plate to the other.

This means that RAM left alone for more than a few tenths of a milisecond will lose enough voltage to drop to a logical 0

Disturbingly wrong. Most manufacturers specify that a row of DRAM must be refreshed at least every 64 milliseconds. In fact, Wikipedia cites a pdf saying that some information can be retained for up to minutes in a cell of DRAM - though you will get some bit errors.

TO prevent this, RAM is constantly refreshed- the ram chip will spend spare cycles writing its own value to itself.

Actually, the memory controller will issue a refresh command to the DRAM chip. This is probably what you were thinking about before...a row refresh must happen every 7.8 microseconds or so (depending on the RAM chip). But, that's because the refresh operation only refreshes a single row. The DRAM chip usually has an internal address counter, so you just say "refresh the next row" and the DRAM chip already knows what the "next row" is, and afterwards it increments it so the next time you issue the refresh command, it refreshes the next row. If you execute these refresh operations every 7.8 microseconds, then in 64 milliseconds you will refresh every row of memory on the DRAM chip.

Oh, and by the way, reading from any cell of DRAM will refresh the entire row that cell is on, because reading from DRAM is a destructive operation. Therefore, there's actually a row of latches at the bottom of the columns, and the values from those latches are placed back into the capacitors while the bit of interest is being shuffled out onto memory bus.

Writing to a cell also requires reading the entire row, which means that writing also refreshes that row.

Re:Err....no.

[omnivagus]

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basicly a capacitor.

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basically [sic] a capacitor.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Err....no.

[DeadCatX2]

Doh. You are correct, my usage of [sic] was wrong.

However, I do not understand what you mean by "You keep using that word." I only used [sic] once.

Re:Err....no.

[omnivagus]

My whole post (minus the link) was a quote from The Princess Bride. It's a very popular meme on /.

Re:Err....no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ownage.... just pure and simple... What made that so bad was that it is Digital Circuits 101. I fear greatly for this country...

Interesting

[pclminion]

It now seems the police will be unable to confiscate computer systems as evidence. Since doing so requires powering the system off, this loses the contents of RAM, and the confiscating officers are therefore contaminating the evidence rendering it unusable in court?

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly what has been ordered. They must capture every change in RAM state, which includes CPU cache and registers. That means they will have to spend millions, if not billions of dollars to develop a solution to do just that since none currently exists.

Print it. All of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I say poll it every second for a day and print it out on paper. Sure it'll cost you $10,000 in paper/toner and take a few printers a week to print... But handing over three tons of single-spaced, double-sided, 10pt printed paper would be satisfying.

Re:Print it. All of it.

[CamD]

All in binary with no human-readability aids (ie. spaces), either.

Re:Print it. All of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why fixed pitch? Use a font where 1 and 0 are different widths and justify. Still, they'd probably just OCR it.

How long will it take...

[KimmoV]

...until DVD-Jon equivalen Torrent-tom comes up with a design for quantum-RAM....sure you can have it but as soon as you observe it it will change value....traceroute that punk! :)

Logging Ramtrees and making Toilet Paper

[mazanoid]

I could see many people in such circumstances having fun with this judge-request.
Because they are simply ordered to log ram (yes that's an exorbitant amount of data and could seriously nerf any productive cycles on a server) I recommend adding (for a dos-style system , modify to suit your os)

1 'Modify loop to run me once every 1 seconds, or just run me indefinately for maximum fun
2 'construct a batch file to erase the multiterabyte random file & call it once every minute
3 ' actually shove it in the autoexec so the first time the computer is repo'd and turned on
10: junkvar = Int(rnd(1)*255) & "." & Int(rnd(1)*255) & "." & Int(rnd(1)*255) & "." & Int(rnd(1)*255)
20: open temptxt.log for append as #1
30: Print #1
40: close #1
50: goto 10
(Validated as working code even!)
And just letting all those ips (mind you a simple program like this would produce a truckload of bogus (and therefore invalidating information as the ram would no longer store tangible GOOD data)

Of course, that would probably be illegal, So nevermind, Don't do it (You've been warned!) because we all know the mpaa is going after an innocent. ^_^

Agreed - mostly

[DeadCatX2]

SRAM only consumes "large currents" (for ambiguous definitions of large) whenever it needs to switch states.

DRAM, however, consumes "large currents" every time it charges a row of capacitors. However, the large current is very brief (on the order of several ns) but happens frequently and periodically (on the order of several us).

DRAM is smaller, simpler and power hungry BECAUSE of all the refresh's required.

Er, it's power hungry because of the refreshes, but it's smaller because it's 1 capacitor and 1 transistor, as opposed to several transistors.

As far as simpler....I wouldn't go that far. SRAM is WAY simpler to interface to than DRAM, because the SRAM doesn't need an intelligent memory controller which understands how to burst large amounts of data, and how to handle the latency for the first access. Oh, yeah, and don't forget that the memory controller needs to send refresh commands periodically to the DRAM...

oops

[Alien54]

[disable the original drives ] I meant: [disassemble the original drives]

MMMMM...

[Phoobarnvaz]

Used to work as a PC tech years ago & people used to wonder what happens when the power went out to whatever they were working on at the time. Stifling back my laughter...I would then ask them what happens to their TV. To this...I would tell them the same thing. To further illustrate the example...would hold up a power cord & tell them that the attention span of their PC was as long as the power cord being plugged into a wall socket.

Simple solution...they don't pay their bills...they lose their power.

great just another addition to us getting screwed

[kaizokuace]

I understand that the judge thinks that because data was in ram at one point that is can be requested or subpoenaed. The implications of this are grave. If we equate ram to the spoken word (which is also 'volatile' since after being spoken it disappears) then we would be having to record everything we say. Even worse, if we don't log all our ram and it is requested as evidence will that just be grounds for guilt? Will we be penalized for not doing something that really the average user doesn't know how to do nor have the hard drive space to hold all that info. I know that this case is about a larger group or company with servers and stuff but what if this kind of ruling scales down to the individual? Everyday the man is jacking up the cost of freedom to the citizens. Damn it how high must that price be to get people to do something about it! If that is even possible! Is this country even a place where we can get enough people organized to really do something about anything? We are just a bunch of cattle to be slaughtered. Everyday I consider moving out of this country but its not much better anywhere else. Someone tell me something to make me feel better about this country.

solution in hardware?

[ctalnh]

Shouldn't this be easy to circumvent in custom hardware? So my understanding is that the IP numbers must be stored in memory in the web server so that the server knows where to send request responses. Why not just have a custom network card do a little more decoding and just maintain hashes of the incoming IP addresses that get filled in with the real addresses when response packets get sent out? Then the system RAM never gets the IP addresses at all. Better yet, do the crypto hash in hardware (new key once in a while, of course) so that the IP addresses never even get stored inside the network card's memory.

logs

[crashelite]

well encrypt the logs with some random encryption cycling the password to random letters and # and symbols (using the whole world wide alphabet including japaneese charicters) and just set it to auto email the log to them every hour and then clear the log from the server using some 128 bit+encryption and say they gave them the logs they wanted but dew to the internet being un secure they had to encrypt it to protect their users.

I feel a song coming on...

[merikari]

Ah, sorry about that, it was something completely different...

-----

FIRST JUDGE: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of copypasta.

SECOND JUDGE: Nothing like a nice order of Château de RAM, eh, Josiah?

THIRD JUDGE: You're right there, Obadiah.

FOURTH JUDGE: Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here with Château de RAM, eh?

FIRST JUDGE: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup bits.

SECOND JUDGE: A cup o' all zeroes, at that.

FOURTH JUDGE: Without capacitors or electricity.

THIRD JUDGE: Or bits.

FIRST JUDGE: In a cracked cup, an' all.

FOURTH JUDGE: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to carry our RAM in a rolled up newspaper.

SECOND JUDGE: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp SIMM.

THIRD JUDGE: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

FIRST JUDGE: Because we were poor. My old Prof used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".

FOURTH JUDGE: Aye, 'e was right.

FIRST JUDGE: Aye, 'e was.

FOURTH JUDGE: I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to scavenge for bits in this tiny old hall with no ventilation for all the excess heat from the computer cluster.

SECOND JUDGE: A hall! You were lucky to work in a house! We used to have court sessions in one dark room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the memory modules were missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of stepping on one them SIMMs.

THIRD JUDGE: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to chew wires for random bits in t' corridor!

FIRST JUDGE: Oh, we used to dream of workin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to get our RAM from an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of IP lawyers dumped all over us! House? Huh.

FOURTH JUDGE: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND JUDGE: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go to the lake and see if someone had simulated a Turing machine with rocks.

THIRD JUDGE: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us working in a computer case in t' middle o' road.

FIRST JUDGE: A tower case?

THIRD JUDGE: Aye.

FIRST JUDGE: You were lucky. We worked for three months in a mini tower in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, ziplock all the zeroes, eat a crust of stale bread, work pro bono, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home the DOJ cronies would thrash us to sleep wi' a belt.

SECOND JUDGE: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel and simulate a Turing machine with our intestines, work twenty hour day pro bono for tuppence a month, come home, and DOJ would send people to thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

THIRD JUDGE: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of pizza boz-sized case at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue just in case someone had left some bits there. We only ever found two bits, a one and a half a zero, worked twenty-four hours a day pro bono for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our DOJ had already fired us and would send someone to slice us in two wit' bread knife.

FOURTH JUDGE: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day for RIAA, and pay the recording industry for permission to come to work, and when we got home, Gonzales would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST JUDGE: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

ALL: They won't!

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[dgatwood]

I once heard a story about IBM doing something like this once in a court case. A judge ordered them to turn over some sort of documentation, so they loaded the electronic version of the documentation into memory and printed a complete core dump on tens of thousands of pages of paper. On the day they were due to produce the documentation, they came into court with a team of movers and presented hundreds of boxes of fanfold paper to the prosecution. (*)

Torrentspy should do likewise. Since it isn't practical (nay, possible) to journal your RAM accesses, they should simply provide hourly core dumps in binary format on paper. It isn't their responsibility to convert the data into a form that is useful for the prosecution. The data is technically there, but is not particularly useful....

(*) Other versions of the story add a statement from the defense to the effect that "This is just the table of contents. The complete documentation is in a warehouse at [address here]" and a parenthetical note that the prosecution never asked for the remaining documentation.

cat /dev/mem /root/ram

[atomicthumbs]

Then print out that "document" and turn it over.

Oh boy...

[Eric Damron]

where's the uninformed moderation class when you need it?

So the servers can't operate?

[Zantetsuken]

I'm guessing the **AA's had info passed to the judge suggesting that the info could be gotten from RAM - knowing full well themselves it cant' be. All they want is to make TorrentSpy's servers inoperable. Except that all they really have to do is spend a few hundred bucks to order more for that one (of how many?) server if staying up is that important to them. And with how much they make off of ads, I think they could easily cover the cost of a lawsuit with an order of more RAM on the side...

Yeah, That's Where They're Prolly Screwed

[cmholm]

(3) the data in issue which is currently routed to a third party entity under contract to defendants
That's the achillies heel, if they are pulling the data out and transmitting it already, they are sunk.

Really, the parent post and another high modded post a bit further down spell it all out.

Re: The SonicBlue / ReplayTV case in 2002...:
Federal Rule 34 Neither Requires Nor Authorizes An Order To Create Records That Do Not Exist.

So, if TorrentSpy had in fact not captured the data in question from RAM and written it to another device (a file, a network port, console, etc), it would seem that they would have, or soon would be, in the clear. If they did capture, they're screwed.

Re:Yeah, That's Where They're Prolly Screwed

[pixelpusher220]

Agreed.

But what my take on the (3) point is that by sending the data in question to a 3rd party, they've already pulled the data out and created a 'record' of it.

This 'record' is neither the random 'noise' of ever changing RAM memory, nor a physical log file that would be preservable. It's been pulled out of RAM, collected and sent outside of the defendant's perview. That might constitute having created a record and certainly would be much easier to 'preserve'; ala lets say an electronic fax. It's never on paper, but it is in a preservable format.

Encrypted Ram

[nurb432]

Time to encrypt datapaths, and all HD content. Or is that too close to 'trusted computing' for comfort?

What about the series of tubes leading into it?

[InsMonkey]

What about the series of tubes leading into it? RAM isn't like a truck you know!

This is not about RAM sticks...

[bigjimrhs]

To all posters that still think this is about turning in RAM chips: stop thinking you are clever by pointing out RAM is volitile!

OK, so the judge says that RAM is a document. Fair enough, but there are flaws:
1) RAM is transient (changes over time), so it would either have to be captured at a particular instant, or some sort of transactional logging would have to be implemented. The overhead of that is HUGE, not to mention storage requirements.
2) RAM is binary. This might be obvious, but the data in RAM is only meaningful to a program that knows how to interpret the raw 1's and 0's. In theory, TorrentSpy could just send a binary image of the RAM contents to the MPAA and say "good luck".

I suspect the next ruling will be to capture memory dumps and provide debugging symbols of TorrentSpy to the MPAA. This would allow the MPAA to drill down into the memory snapshot and recover the IP addresses they are after. Unfortunately, this potentially exposes other information contained in the memory dump that was not ordered from the subpeona.

The ultimate point is that, as other users have pointed out, data in non-persistent places are now deemed "documents" in whatever form they might be in. Now, with the help of these "memory documents" sensitive information could potentially be recovered: Passwords, banking information, the list of websites you visited recently, even searches that you made on TorrentSpy (even if you download or share nothing!).

At some point I hope a distinction is made between having data, looking for data, using data, sharing data (access), and distributing data. Currently it seems the idea of data is that if you have/want to have/or did have it, you fit into all of the above categories. This makes it easy to find you guilty!

When everyone is assumed a criminal

[nurb432]

They are easier to control, and rights simply become a memory and a nuisance.

Reminds me of an old DOS product

[nurb432]

DejaView.. It would take snapshots of your ram and create a file off them so you could restore them later and umm *cough* bypass copy protection.

Cool little product.

Storage space????

[raymansean]

Since I do not know much about ram and how it works, I will go for the obvious question. If a server is required to log the contents of it's RAM or the initial state of its ram and then all the changes that are written to the ram, would this not create a huge amount useless LARGE files? Then the question becomes, how long do I store this information? If one were compelled to log the contents of their RAM 16X's a second and you keep your Log for an hour and you have 2GB of ram that results in approx. 115 TB of data. That seems a little steep. But I suppose if I was a admin for a server, I could comply and hand over the raw data... they would then spend more time and money trying to parse the bits than they could ever hope to get out of some Joe Smoe for downloading millions of songs.

Re:Storage space????

[bigjimrhs]

Also, in your scenario, 2GB at 16 captures per second is 32GB per second. One would have to have a VERY expensive disk array to keep up with that kind of load. A standard home desktop would be hard pressed to capture memory once a minute... and that would be pegging the system just to RECORD everything, not even talking about using the system to do anything USEFUL...

cat /proc/kcore lpr

[tehdaemon]

cat /proc/kcore > lpr
And send the MPAA the bill for a new laser printer, toner and about a thousand reams of paper, and first class postage for shipping it to them.

Rerun this command as often as the printer finishes, (and get more ram *evil grin*)

T

Send the whole box!

[stevenm86]

Instead of yanking the RAM boards, why not send the whole server? Take it off the rack, unplug it, and send it! Then be like, "See? I didn't even tamper with the RAM.. here's the whole machine, unopened!"

Re:Huh? How are they subject to U.S. law?

[WidescreenFreak]

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up.

How!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... even from a legal perspective, I had thought that several copyright provisions expressly state that RAM is ephemeral (not tangible). Now, IANAL either, but someone else pointed out this case which seems to indicate that those better versed with the law agree with me. Obviously, you need a lawyer if you ever litigate over this, though.

The real WTF here is that they're supposedly allowed to redact the IPs. That'd make the resulting "document" useless for anyone. So not only are they being asked to create logs in spite of Rule 43 saying no such thing, they're being asked to create useless ones!

mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy wants to mutilate my penis! What a sick, demented bastard.

Are you related to Amanda Monti (picture) by any chance?

is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

i am kinda late to the fray, but the actual ruling doesn't seem to concern itself with the technical aspects of RAM, instead, it addressess the argument "does TorrentSpy have electronic recordings of their server logs", and, as far as read, it seems to say "yes, because data is in RAM for a while, and RAM is an electronic media built for the purpose of storage and retrieval of information, albeit short-term one, and TorrentSpy can read the data during that time".

The whole argument is there in the first place because TorrentSpy seem to allege they don't have logs because the logs are not on disk, but in RAM, which is transient and not an electronic medium.

So, to my IANAL eyes the ruling says "if you are in the US, and you have been issued a court order to store all your electronic communications, you better do so and don't come up with excuses which are lame technically."

I respectfully decline to comment on whether this ruling is good, bad or ugly.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Brian Gordon]

The excuse that RAM is volatile is hardly lame, it's just the way computers are built and no amount of judicial yammering will change it.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

Yeah, but the judge isn't talking about the volatility of RAM per se, but the ability to read from it while the data is in there, the point seemingly being that log data can be read from RAM while it is operational and that RAM volatility isn't an excuse to not create logs once ordered.

If you read the ruling, you'll see is is all about logging user data, that TorrentSpy puts up many other reasons for not logging access, and they are all thrown out. To me it reads as it isn't about RAM, but about TorrentSpy excuses for not logging.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Hal_Porter]

Well, they could write them to disk then couldn't they? There's a world of difference between "we never had that data" and "we did have it we don't store it on disk. It sits in RAM for a while and then we delete it". The ruling means that deciding not to store it on disk is close to destroying evidence, which is very illegal.

Which, despite the spin and your personal feeling about torrents is not unreasonable. Let's suppose I gathered information about murders in Ram and make a conscious decision to delete it rather than storing it on disk. Should that be legal? Or should the judge have the power to force me to write the log to disk in future if someone tries to subpoena it?

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Fordiman]

'cept that, even if they were to send out their 'RAM logs', they'd only be for the instant a sample was taken; ie: useless.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

'cept the judge suggests logs be offloaded onto a permanent storage and delivered as a text file, smartass.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Fordiman]

Ok. First off, 'delivered as a text file' is meaningless; we're talking about binary data. You can't just convert back and forth willy nilly. Does he want a hex dump? Would he (or, hell, anyone) know what to *do* with a hex dump?

Meanwhile, an apache process occupies roughly 13M of ram.

What refresh rate? Anything that could be reasonably likely to catch a 'hit' (and, thus, contain useful data) would need to be >1Hz - but that would require storage in excess of 1.06TB/day for *maybe* a thousand or so IP addresses.

That's, of course, for each Apache process. There's normally two, and they branch off if they get enough traffic.

Riiiight.

Of course, the server could parse out this memory dump and filter for IP addresses (which, in Apache, are indistinguishable from any other spot in memory; they're just stored as sets of four bytes - ie: impossible to distinguish).

But then, Apache actually has the capability of doing this: it's called 'logging' - which the judge can't or won't specifically request.

But this is fine. I suggest emailing a RAM dump of the Apache processes, hexed, gzipped, once every five seconds.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[glesga_kiss]

The ruling means that deciding not to store it on disk is close to destroying evidence, which is very illegal.

So, when you switch logging from TRACE to ERROR you are breaking the law?

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Hal_Porter]

No, I don't think so. But once someone subpoenas the information you have to go back to TRACE.

Imagine if it were paper documents. You could have a policy to shred day to day stuff (i.e. you're in ERROR mode). But then if someone subpoenas you have to keep everything. Actually, that's not quite right. Evidence that might end up in court would be kept even in ERROR logs.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[glesga_kiss]

No, I don't think so. But once someone subpoenas the information you have to go back to TRACE.

From a performance standpoint, that is insane. You won't be able to serve as many users if you are doing that level of logging, it's a lot of I/O traffic. Especially if it's a single log file for all client-handling threads; you are adding an artificial thread-synchronized block of code to every action. Ouch!

You could have a policy to shred day to day stuff (i.e. you're in ERROR mode).

The problem is that the judges paper analogy doesn't hold; you aren't shredding because you never had the info in the first place. Should we be logging all HTTP headers for example? The referal ID might be useful in a criminal case.

Another analogy might be my daily activies. Say I was asked by the authorities what bus I caught to town six months ago. Was it the 08:30 or the 8:45 one? I had the information at the time, but never logged it as it has no reasonable use at a later date.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[gsslay]

Quit contributing facts and logic to the usual slashdot pile-on! We want more uninformed comment and overblown outrage! The MPAA is evil and the courts don't understand!! Don't make me RTFA!!!

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

yours is a post with a lot of stuff, but in reality the matter is simple and almost non-technical.
it goeth a bit like the following synopsis:

0. MAFIAA sez in court they needz teh logs to show TS helps copyright infringement
(they want to show stuff like urls and filenames, not l33t hex dumps)
1. the judge agrees that's reasonable, asks TS logfiles.
2. TS replies: OMGLOLZ we don't keep log files and teh data isn't there anywayz
3. the MAFIAA calls expert who sez STFU, while data is in teh RAM you can copy it to a logfile
4. judge says: correctamundo, make the flow of data from RAM to log files happen, and hand in the log files
5. TS goes like: OMG our users business model privacy european lawz LOLZ again!!!!111
6. judge says: take it easy, scratch out IP addresses and deliver the logs only from your US servers

end of story, MAFIAA wins this step, TS sounds not l33t, and that is regardless of what I think of that 'intellectual proprety' stuff, of which I don't think much.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

in my humble opinion MAFIAA _is_ evil, actually pretty close to the epitome of evil. being informed and seeing the issues clearly is a very important first step in confronting and (hopefully) eradicating that evil, where available.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[gsslay]

Hmmm, I would think that one of the first steps in being informed and seeing issues clearly would be avoiding dumb made-up names, and referring to the organisations by their proper titles. Does calling them "MAFIAA" help your argument? Perhaps a name like 'Baby-Eaters-of-Satan' would work better with the whole vilification process? No one likes people who eat babies, and it certainly makes it easier to attack them rather than those issues you were talking about, doesn't it?

You see, all you're doing is falling into line with the process of deliberately misrepresenting the MPAA's actions (as this slashdot article does) in order to ridicule and justify arguments against them. Scores a few cheap points, but we've lost sight of the real facts and those issues again, haven't we?

If what the MPAA is doing is wrong, and if the courts have the wrong idea of the issues, then they should be attacked for what they are. But most of the articles and subsequent comments of slashdot are transparent exercises in strawman construction followed by a pile-on. All this would suggest is that you believe the arguments against the actual facts are insufficient to convince anyone. So lets just make stuff up instead.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

an organization that rackets its suppliers and customers and bribes governments internationally to pass laws that subvert the social contract that gave it money in the first place it is just as mafiotic as the mafia that the likes (or the unlikes) of Don Corleone run. the fact that it is 'legal' only makes it more dangerous. the presence of corrupt politicians who fall for the money doesn't reflect to the "rightness" of the cause.

to godwin the thread, mass-murdering certain kinds of people was legal, lawful and encouraged in certain nazi and communist regimes.that don't make it right. similarly, the way MAFIAA is using money and extortion laws to extend the limited monopoly that society gives to authors forever and rob the human culture isn't right.

btw, what exactly am I making up and what exactly am I misrepresenting?

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Stooshie]

... Does he want a hex dump? ...

RTFA. The Judge was called Jacqueline

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[KDR_11k]

That's like saying "You're under investigation, now show us what you did at the time of the crime". Logging after the subpoena is there is pointless since they can just stop violating the law before they start logging (or is not committing a crime now a crime in itself?).

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

No, it isn't. It is more like telling a corporation currently engaged in a fraud "give us all the data of what you're doing that are relevant to the case from now on, and keep everything else in case it is requested by the judge".

The outcome of the case that MAFIAA is going for is to prove that TorrentSpy vicariously infringes on MAFIAA rights by hosting tracker data. To convince the judge and make TorrentSpy disappear, MAFIAA wants to show that TS exists mostly because they help people infringe on copyrights, and for that they need some filenames, or so the judge has instructed.

I.e. this case is not only about the _past_, this is about the _future_. If TS loses, they will have to pay some damages for their past behaviour, and stop providing services in the future.

The bigger problem of whether vicarious liability exists when you host torrent data isn't decided by the case, it is written in the laws that are passed by the US congress, _under the influence_ of thick wads of MAFIAA cash.

If you want to change that, you need to talk to the Congress, and not to the judge though.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Hal_Porter]

From a performance standpoint, that is insane. You won't be able to serve as many users if you are doing that level of logging, it's a lot of I/O traffic. Especially if it's a single log file for all client-handling threads; you are adding an artificial thread-synchronized block of code to every action. Ouch!

The only reason that the situation arrives is because most of TorrentSpy's users are pirating stuff. If they weren't then TorrentSpy wouldn't have been forced to preserve the logs.

The problem is that the judges paper analogy doesn't hold; you aren't shredding because you never had the info in the first place.

Yeah they did, they just only stored it in Ram. Of course a tracker knows the IP addresses of peers. That's analogous to having a document which could be used as evidence of a crime but shredding rather than filing it. And if you do that to protect people breaking laws, you go to jail.

Keeping documents rather than shredding them imposes costs on businesses, just like logging does on servers, but the costs of not doing it, i.e. jail and/or lawsuits are greater.

Look it's not hard. If you run a business and you aid and abet piracy or any criminal activity sooner or later the legal system will shut you down. And if you're dumb enough to try to bullshit your way out of this with excuses like the ones you posted, you go to jail.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[rtb61]

If there is no legal compulsion to log access, and you are not some privacy invasive data mining freak then why would you bother committing resources to doing so. What point or benefit in logging to hdisk a public server, sure if it is private and you are doing so for security purposes fine, but if it is public, seriously why would you waste resources on it.

For example, take your typical little broadband modem, firewall, router switch, by far the majority do not log every access attempt. So if you set up a little server with boot only from cd/dvd rom, a configured read only hdisk (for security as it is a public server) for file serving only and everything running in ram, what can the judge say, that hardware serves all the purposes you require and has no capacity for logging access.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hal, assuming the outcome of the case is not a good way to argue what the outcome of the case should be. Or were you talking about something else?

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[gsslay]

rob the human culture

I don't see anyone getting robbed here. The film or music is still part of human culture.

btw, what exactly am I making up and what exactly am I misrepresenting?

Well clearly I didn't mean you personally and specifically. I meant the whole thrust of these slashdot articles. What's been misrepresented here; the idea that some ignorant judge (at the 'MAFIAA's request) actually asked for the RAM chips out of a server. What's been made up? Well here's a brand new example of the usual; http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238719&cid =19539997. Comment by MPAA member about property crime gets turned into one about rape. See, it wasn't enough to address what he actually said, further stuff had to be made up. You don't have to agree with the MPAA to see that this is a unfair and stupid way to argue a counterpoint.

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

rob the human culture

I don't see anyone getting robbed here. The film or music is still part of human culture.

When the copyright of an art work is pushed into perpetuality (i.e. made into "intellectual property"), no one can freely use the part of the culture that is created by the art work. This is not a natural state of the affairs, as copying was the norm (and a rather beneficial norm) during the human history.

When the copyright contract between the society and the artist was established, the rationale was: a _limited_ monopoly (granted by the society) that allows profit, in exchange for the right of the society to use the work for free when the monopoly expires. This contract is now being subverted by governments bribed or pressured by the MAFIAA and related organizations.

As laws become more complex, the risks associated with doing artistic work _outside_ the MAFIAA umbrella are growing. Thus, effort going into such work diminishes, and the MAFIAA (and the governments it bribes) are given an undue influence over the culture.

Such attempts to violate the said contract, perpetuate copyright and promote the nefairous concept of "intellectual property" are therefore acts of highway robbery with respect to human culture. This act is even more ridiculous, because the current Hollywood riches were made on what is now referred to as "copyright theft" -- which happened a lot in the US before Hollyword became a proponent of "intellectual property".

God I hope they use NAT

[Anonymous Coward]

actually if they do, do the router caches count as RAM?

dream on

[Anonymous Coward]

i normally don't troll around here, but...do WE REALLY need to tell the industry that we are the turtle in that race? are they THAT dumb that they couldn't figure that out for themselves? there is no catch up to the turtle, the turtle ALWAYS wins this kind of race.

i mean, honestly... you can't stop that "pirating" (i personally like that term). the ones who like to do this kinda stuff will ALWAYS download "illegal" stuff of the internet, be it via private ftp servers, be it via .torrent files. oh, you taking down these private ftp sites? fine, we use .torrent. and so on, and on, and on... just look at the internet's history. these binary usenet groups are still working.

oh, and i'm one of these pirates. and like real pirates, i don't care, because, yeah, somehow indirectly i steal money from someone, but i know i don't steal it from the poor. but do you know what really bothers me? that the spell check in firefox does count the term "firefox" as a mistake.

Cool!

[Solandri]

This is an explicit writ authorizing anyone the legal right to record any and all information that passes through the RAM on their computer. I.E. if I own webserver X, I am within my legal right to log all information, or a portion thereof, that passes through my system, by virtue that it will reside, however briefly, in that system's RAM.

So if I'm hearing you right, this means I can make copies of all those DVDs, CDs, ebooks, and music files I play on my computer, regardless of whatever DRM restrictions the manufacturers have placed on them. After all I'm not copying the DVD, I'm just copying the contents of what's in my RAM. (Yes I'm being facetious, but the judge started it.)

Re:Cool!

[Col. Blackwolf]

Technically, it could be interpreted that way. Hmm, maybe we should spread this info around to all the defense lawyers in the RIAA suits.

Air

[FiniteElementalist]

Air is a temporary medium that stores information, particularly in the terms of voice communication. Suppose if Torrentspy was storing this information in their air temporarily (say you have one guy telling IP addresses or torrent hosts to another), they are in volation by not recording the contents of that air and presenting it as documentation to the court.

Now, of course that is completely absurd for air. But it really isn't that much less absurd for RAM, given it's nature and the requirements necessary to record it.

Also, I'm getting word that the requirement of creating documents, even if they are simply derivatives of other documents, is illegal. So even if the judge's order was legal, which is HIGHLY questionable, TorrentSpy could get away with presenting her with thousands of pages of indecipherable hex dumps.

In any case this is absurd.

Holy crap. Wow.

[Lethyos]

You did, in fact, just positively smack the shit out of that n00b. Well done.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[aluser]

if I own webserver X, I am within my legal right to log all information, or a portion thereof, that passes through my system

Webserver? You're not thinking large enough. How about a major router...

Hand over the RAM and no one gets hurt

[WillAffleckUW]

just don't power it.

Problem solved ...

no power, no info, no harm, no foul.

Now, if they want the flash memory, that is a whole nother can of worms ... oops ... hmmm, why is it empty? must have been static discharge ....

Haha!

[georgespamungus]

What a smart judge!

No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get some "holes" for Slippery Pete and you're all set.

All your RAM are belong to US!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have RAM at your house?

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[RobinH]

The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced. Worse (more intrusive) actually, since RAM must be slowed to be recorded. RAM is as ephemeral as air.

I disagree. The correct "meat space" equivalent would be that you have to produce the telephone number that you wrote down for your wife on the whiteboard by the phone (i.e. all notes on the whiteboard must be transcribed to a more permanent media because once recorded on the white board, they are technically documents). I use phone number as an example because it's similar to an IP address.

To go along the lines you're describing, I happen to use VoIP at my house for phone service and all conversations exist in RAM at some point (at least in my router or on the telephone adapter). Could I be required to log all the data because it technically exists as a document when it's in RAM? I have caller ID and the incoming caller's number certainly exists in RAM at some point - could that be subpoena'd?

That's food for thought. :)

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Col. Blackwolf]

Quite true. And if you send sensitive information (credit card #, etc) over anything without some kind of protection, you cannot reasonably expect it to stay private. This is even true for snail mail, hence the lining of envelopes with random ink patterns to obscure the contents from a bright light.

However, the problem I see here is that once that data has moved through my server, and I have copied it out of RAM, that copy is my property. I can do whatever I want with it, including running it through decryption software to read the contents. As long as I can prove that I'm using a copy of the RAM, this writ supports my right to use that data anyway I see fit. While I do not see corporations and ISPs doing this on a broad scale, the potential for it to be abused is there. Just think, now the gov't can legally obtain the data moving through, say, one of AT&Ts backbone switches, by executing a simple civil discovery motion, and use that data however they see fit. No need for a warrant, no need to prove a criminal event has, is or could occur, just a quick little motion and they can monitor your email to their hearts content.

Will that happen? Probably not, but the potential remains.

Miracle on 34th Street

[Felix Da Rat]

I have few qualms with this. The state of the RAM at any given point is there. Some atomic elements only exist for a microsecond, but are still known to exist.

But, I do have to wonder what would happen if someone were to hit the courts with that much data.

For a moment assume that every change in RAM is logged to a file. And follow that assumption that roughly 1MB of text ~= a book (Okay, say Ivanhoe instead of War and Peace). Now if the server has (let's guess a conservative) 4 GB of RAM, and changes are happening at some nanosecond rate, that's the Library of Congress in well under a minute (okay, I'm making that up, I have no idea how large the LoC is). I'd say print it. Give it to the judge. Give it to the *IAA. Let them build a house out of the endless pages of dump that you'd get. It may be a document, but that does not mean it's a document anyone can read. Is the onus upon the defendant to translate it into another language more understandable by their attacker? If so, that's a bit of a problem for everyone who says 'Encrypt your communications'. Doesn't that then get into 5th amendment issues as well?

So give it to them. Give it to them on dead tree.

FDR.

Choice quote . . .

[Anonymous Freak]

From a TorrentSpy user:

"To imagine my information being disseminated without my written or verbal consent is unnerving," she said. "Then again, if I'm doing something I know is illegal, can I protest?"

Uh... Your "information being disseminated without [your] consent..."??? You mean, like you're doing to the MPAA by disseminating their movies (aka "information",) without their consent? At least there i the "can I protest?" caveat on the end to show that this person has some sense of reality.

free() enhancement: now does complete memory dump

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be more than happy to make a complete system memory dump every time free() is called. All they have to do is come along with their hard disk arrays ready on trucks (so I can plug them in via a long 48gbps fibre cable), and away we go. My server has 16GB of RAM and will take a while to write a copy of it every free() call, but that is OK, as I just want to make sure I'm not destroying any documents in memory.

However I am VERY worried about the registers on my 4x quad core 64-bit server. As each of the various registers can store a document, I would hate for the register values to be overwritten without having a backup copy of the document. I have no idea how to fix this problem... I think Intel/AMD may have to change their CPU designs!

Also as my server is networked, I am worried about packets being dropped by my system kernel. With the change to free() using considerable system resources, dropped packets are a real possibility. If the documents are stored in the wire for even 1ns during transfer, then I need to make sure I'm not erasing them by dropping them at the kernel network driver level! Has anyone got a suggestion for an external wiretap device I could use to ensure compliance? It needs to be able to run at 2x1gbps speeds (full capacity) and interface directly with the raid array trucks I mentioned earlier.

Thanks for any help, I am really concerned about compliance with this important matter.

glibc free() diff: who wants to help write a patch

[Anonymous Coward]

From glibc 2.6, does anyone want to help write a patch that saves "documents" before deliberately destroying the evidence (aka freeing memory)?

void
public_fREe(Void_t* mem)
{
  mstate ar_ptr;
  mchunkptr p; /* chunk corresponding to mem */
 
  void (*hook) (__malloc_ptr_t, __const __malloc_ptr_t) = __free_hook;
  if (hook != NULL) {
    (*hook)(mem, RETURN_ADDRESS (0));
    return;
  }
 
  if (mem == 0) /* free(0) has no effect */
    return;
 
  p = mem2chunk(mem);
 
#if HAVE_MMAP
  if (chunk_is_mmapped(p)) /* release mmapped memory. */
  {
/* see if the dynamic brk/mmap threshold needs adjusting */
    if (!mp_.no_dyn_threshold
    && p->size > mp_.mmap_threshold
        && p->size <= DEFAULT_MMAP_THRESHOLD_MAX)
      {
    mp_.mmap_threshold = chunksize (p);
    mp_.trim_threshold = 2 * mp_.mmap_threshold;
      }
    munmap_chunk(p);
    return;
  }
#endif
 
  ar_ptr = arena_for_chunk(p);
#if THREAD_STATS
  if(!mutex_trylock(&ar_ptr->mutex))
    ++(ar_ptr->stat_lock_direct);
  else {
    (void)mutex_lock(&ar_ptr->mutex);
    ++(ar_ptr->stat_lock_wait);
  }
#else
  (void)mutex_lock(&ar_ptr->mutex);
#endif
  _int_free(ar_ptr, mem);
  (void)mutex_unlock(&ar_ptr->mutex);
}

Anticipatory wiretapping?

[Rick Genter]

How is this decision any different than one ordering a phone company to record all phone calls that cross its network so that recordings related to alleged crimes can be gathered for evidence?

Or perhaps, ordering a phone company to turn over all of their billing records so that the prosecution can sift through them looking for phone numbers related to alleged crimes?

I thought subpoenas had to be precise...

Serious question - How to do this if you had to?

[Hyperhaplo]

Technical question: How would you capture all information that goes through RAM?
Next question: How would you store it? That's got to be GB of data for a server..

Dumping RAM to disk would not be good - that would be 2GB+ for every dump and would not include all of the information in RAM.

Even then, how would you get it to them? You would need a removable hard drive just to store this information. Who pays for the storage space, the CPU time to do this processing and the human time required to set it up?

Bunch of Idiots.

[kahrytan]

  Don't they realize RAM is cleared when computer is shutdown? It won't hold any information. Besides, Torrentspy isn't a tracker. And Torrentspy can change the way they do things to ensure privacy and keep people coming. They can use Google to search tracker websites.

There's dumb, really dumb, and federally dumb.

[Torodung]

The judge *ordered* a core dump?

Hilarious. They should crash their machines and redirect the dump to his fax.

--
Toro

Re:copying memory

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be done. It just requires special hardware to support it. Some (very) old computers had a similar capability, where you could halt the processor and then examine (and even change) RAM. This was necessary because that was a) how they were programmed and b) how you got the results out. The fancy ones used hex inputs and readouts instead of binary. As far a "when", the indication is any time the memory is changed. Since the court can't force you to summarize, that would mean a complete RAM dump every time the CPU initiates a write cycle. They can make you provide it on DVDs, so printing it all out is a no-no, but still. If your machine has 4GB of RAM, that would be millions of DVDs per second. Undue burden, anyone?

/my keyword for posting this is 'innocent' :)

Mods on crack, as usual

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Because the guy is making up bullshit. It is obvious to anyone who knows anything about electronics or computers. DRAM is made up of capacitors which do store charge, but it leaks away in a matter of seconds or minutes based on the quality and size of capacitor. SRAM is made up of transisters and loses all its state as soon as power is lost.Neither one of these would retain any data whatsoever without power after even a small amount of time, say 15 minutes.

Apparently pretty pictures of electromigration constitute "making up bullshit"...

Holy crap, you people are arrogant

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I don't know where this oxide damage nonsense comes from, but...

It comes from New Zealand. Specifically, from Peter Gutmann. It's briefly covered in section 7 ("Methods of Recovery for Data stored in Random-Access Memory") of this paper, and elaborated on in a paper called Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices.

Seriously, you don't know everything there is to know about physics.

Re:Holy crap, you people are arrogant

[Shadowruni]

Yeah some are... but thing is, that paper isn't widely known and I'm willing to bet critical parts of my President's body that the GP didn't know that either and was simply talking out his ass.
Other than that, the resources required to pull off what that paper describes (and do it right!), are pretty much limited to big three letter agencies (whom I'm MORE THAN WILLING TO BET have known this for years!)

Re:Holy crap, you people are arrogant

[Fordiman]

Ok. I didn't know about all that. Still, it's more oxide impurity level than damage; it doesn't actually hurt the RAM. And it dissipates 'eventually' - which could mean from minutes to months, so maybe you could recover the data that way.

Still an academic question, though; the instantaneous data found on the RAM would only have the IP addresses of the last 10, perhaps 20 visitors, and would be nigh-impossible to extract.

Re:Holy crap, you people are arrogant

[mollymoo]

Yeah some are... but thing is, that paper isn't widely known and I'm willing to bet critical parts of my President's body that the GP didn't know that either and was simply talking out his ass.

The GP had posted a link to the paper 18 minutes before you cliam he was talking out of his ass and twelve hours before your post, which is prima facie evidence that you are utterly wrong. Please remove the body parts and put them through a mincer. Thanks for playing.

Re:Holy crap, you people are arrogant

[Shadowruni]

Guess I was... [drags body to Soylent Green Machine]

Implications

[Slotty]

IANAL. Would this present a basis for case law I'd be more concerned with the far reaching implications this has. In fact if RAM is in fact a form of documentation for any device that utilizes RAM which I couldn't see if it was server specific or not would have to store that memory in a non volatile way. In essence if someone who is a lawyer or legally trained would they be able to explain to me if you would have to record all information that passes through your webserver until the statute of limitations expires on that specific piece of information?

man!

[webmonkey44]

what on earth?!

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[mpe]

Of course, the obvious solution is that since they are asking for the documents as they exist in memory, (and no more can be asked to be prepared), they could pull an IBM and hand the court raw core dumps of the whole server taken once every second or as quickly as technically feasible.

Maybe IBM has a fast printer they could lend them so that they can supply the contents of the memory neatly printed (in hex or binary) on fanfold paper.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[mpe]

However, the problem I see here is that once that data has moved through my server, and I have copied it out of RAM, that copy is my property.

Actually it depends where your server is. If it's in the US that might well be the case. If it's in the EU (or anywhere else with data protection legislation) the data could easily still belong to someone else (and you may need to declare if you are collecting it and/or pass it on to third parties.)

Make them buy IBM!!

[simm1701]

Simple solution - buy an IBM server with RAID 1 battery backed RAM

(yes they have them, the x366 iirc)

The ram banks were hot swap and had enough battery to preserve the contents for a week or two - in theory one of the banks could be sent to IBM with data included in order to debug a problem with the exact state recorded

Of course these servers don't come cheap - but if the RIAA want to provide me with a 4 way xeon with hot swap battery backed redundant RAM I'm sure I can send them the contents of the RAM from my torrent tracker - after I rewrite the software so IPs are stored hashed only :)

Re:Make them buy IBM!!

[SharpFang]

No, they'll sue you into buying one.

RAM is not a document damn it!

[RearNakedChoke]

This ruling is ridiculous. Just because data is in RAM doesn't mean I can just capture it at will. RAM is not a document damn it! If a physical analogy must be made for simple minds to comprehend, RAM is more like a freaking swirling, turbulent ocean. Logging data is intrusive and expensive and may require significant software engineering. This requires spending time and money that the **AA fools should be doing not torrentspy. If the judge wants RAM, then guess what? TS should do a memory dump and the **AA retards can sift through the GB of data for their precious little IPs. That judge is retard.

What about the RJ45 cable that binary data passed?

[zukinux]

Binary data had passed in the RJ45 cable connected to that computer, I think the defendant should pass this cable immediately since there might be still data inside of the cable.

If you only gonna read ONE comment, read this o

[Big Nothing]

Q: Does the judge really want TorrentSpy to hand over their RAM chips?
A: No, f****** moron. The judge simply says that information that exists in RAM can be retrieved.

Q: What's this all about?
A: It goes down like this:
1. TorrentSpy has been slapped with an order to log traffic
2. TorrentSpy claims that since their servers have no hard drive (only RAM) there "are no logs"
3. Judge calls bullshit. The logs exist and can be transferred to other media. TorrentSpy must do this cause they are legally obligated to do so.

As usual, the article summary misrepresents the story. TorrentSpy claims that it can't turn over certain data because it was never logged. The judge ruled that since the data in question existed in the RAM, TorrentSpy was in possession of said data and must preserve it for discovery, i.e. start logging it. The judge in no way ruled that they must physically turn over the RAM chips.

Q: But a defendant cannot be compelled to create new documents for the plaintiff, even if the new document would just be a compilation and/or summary of other documents.
A: That's just it: the information allready exist. It just need to be stored "permanently" (read: for years instead of miliseconds).

Q: Wouldn't this mean that TorrentSpy has to change the HW configuration of their servers?
A: Yes, It basically means that using RAM-based servers without permanently logging traffic is not the legal loophole once believed.

This is not the first time that a company/organization has been ordered to change the way their system works. In the SonicBlue/ReplayTV case [2002] the court ordered ReplayTV to create the technology to record information about subscribers for purposes of determining how much of ReplayTV usage was violating and the law.

Q: Is there no way out of this? Will the MAFIAA have their way?
A: The judge doesn't say that the logs have to be stored electronically... Nor that they have to be stored chronologically or otherwise in a logical, searchable manner.

Re:If you only gonna read ONE comment, read this o

[bratwiz]

So what you're saying in a nutshell is that they could hand them a piece of paper with:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx yz1234567890!@#$%^&*()-_=+[]{}\|:;"',.?/~`

written on it with the explanation that its a "TERSE ENCODING of all of the relevant logs information."

Re:If you only gonna read ONE comment, read this o

[Anonymous Coward]

No. And that would reduce to 0 1 anyways. Especially if you wanted to be sure to capture the non-printed ASCII characters. And who says RAM encodes in ASCII anyways?

What I would do is get a bank of old-school serial printers and send the output of the data on the RAM chips in its binary format to the printers. Two gigabytes of RAM equals in excess of eight billion bits. I am not sure how many characters, or just a matrix of pixels (black and white; i.e., print a dot or don't), fill a single sheet of paper. But one snapshot of the RAM at one moment in time alone should demonstrate the full fool-hardiness of requiring any sort of RAM document production.
 
Any additional document creation, by forcing them to turn on logging software or to employ technicians to attempt to summarize the RAM document into a more human-readable form, would violate basic long-standing discovery rules.

xm save server1 server1_ram.img

[DedicatedErik]

It was of course possible all along to read the RAM, but in defense they could say that it's practically to hard.

But now, with virtualization becomming more and more common by the day, this might be easier than you think. Saving an instance of a VMs RAM is certainly possible. We use it to be able to suspend and resume virtualized boxes.

NAT is the answer!

[PGillingwater]

TorrentSpy need to simply place (for performance reasons, of course) a NAT device in front of their servers.

Imagine the prosecution's face when they read 100 Gb of logs all originating from 10.0.0.1.

Stupid headline

[Handlarn]

This is the most stupid headline I've seen on Slashdot for as long as I've been here. The summary isn't doing much to clear things up either.

People, read the damn article! But I guess an easy chance to get your post moderated Funny is too hard to give up a lot of you. Too bad there is basically only one joke in this entire thread and it's been told about 200 times now.

Seriously to whoever posted this submit better summaries!

Zappa was here first, speaking in 1979

[Oshkoshjohn]

"Eventually it was discovered that God did not want us to be all the same.

  This was bad News for the Governments of The World as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings.

  Mankind must be made more uniformly if the Future was going to work.

  Various ways were sought to bind us all together. But, alas, same-ness was unenforcable.

  It was about this time that someone came up with the idea of Total Criminalization.

  Based on the principle that if we were all crooks, we could at least be uniform to some degree in the eyes of The Law.

  Shrewdly, our legislators calculated that most people were too lazy to perform a Real Crime. So new laws were manufactured, making it possible for anyone to violate them any time of the day or night, and once we had all broken some kind of law we'd all be in the same big happy club, right up there with the President, the most exalted industrialists, and the clerical big shots of all your favorite religions

  Total Criminalization was the greatest idea of its time, and was vastly popular except with those people who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws.

  So, of course, they had to be tricked Into It, which is one of the reasons why Music was eventually made illegal."

FRANK ZAPPA - "Joe's Garage" (1979)

A Good Sign

[flyneye]

This is a good sign that we need higher qualifications for judges than to be a failed lawyer who couldn't make it in a practice.
This is also a good time to repeal the abilities of politicians to appoint judges and find more worthy criteria.
Our gov't. shouldn't be our enemy.Perhaps as Franklin said,we should have a revolution every now and then to clear out the Hillaries ,Georges and ass'd Kennedys.

Re:A Good Sign

[Anonymous Coward]

And likewise I think we should have higher qualifications for Slashdot posters other than to be a failed activist who couldn't make it practice.

Perhaps as JEFFERSON said, we should have a revolution now and then... yada yada...

Contact info?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know an e-mail addy or telephone number for Chooljian or her offices? I want to call / e-mail her and rant at her for bringing her technologically foolish self into a case whose just resolution demands specific technical knowledge. How can we trust our judicial system when idiocy such as this is so commonplace? If YOU go to trial for any offense, do you want a misinformed and whimsical judge deciding your fate?

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the FBI calls "a major router" the carnivore project.

They will say....

[tinkerghost]

That by providing data on where to obtain movies, torrentspy is engaging in 'contributory infringement'. It's the same thing they have been saying since day 1, and it generally seems that the US courts are willing to buy it.

why do i get the feeling?

[pjr.cc]

I read this article and had to check my watch - i was wondering if i'd overslept this morning and it was the 1st of april all of sudden.

After realizing it wasn't I still wasn't sure if it was an improvement knowing i hadn't spent the last couple of months in a coma and that the law really is that insane after all..

how about just bring in the ethernet cable?

[swschrad]

ALL the data had to cross that cable, right? same thing as pulling the RAM out and taking it down to the sheriff's office. and it's easier to get to, just unplug it and put it in a brown envelope.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you have people/companies renting logical partitions on your server, you get to take any data they ever run through the CPU (since they all use the same physical RAM -- yours).

OpenBSD Virtual Memory Encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you know why openbsd supports encryption of the virtual memory page file.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Shai-kun]

It seems strange to invoke Rule 34 on that...

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[arborlaw]

Rule 34 is the rule on discovery and requests for production. The excerpt I cited was a response to a discovery request for the defendant to create a mechanism to store data and "create data" so the plaintiff could analyze it to see if the defendant's technology was infringing, IIRC.

That's a different litigation context than what's going on with the Torrent stuff.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse still is the fact that you don't need a "computer" to have RAM, or the concept of storage. Thus, VOIP phones are likely equally compelled. Ditto for mobile phones, I would think. One could certainly read it to include anything that uses digital technology (which, these days, is just about everything).

Shut the fuck up already moron

[dharbee]

You posted a 10 year old paper with no real credibility. Why do you keep acting like you found the fucking rosetta stone.

Do yourself a favor, in the future before you post and say something amazingly stupid again, find out what it takes to make a paper credible. Because as it stands now, you have no fucking clue.

And you're still wrong.

"Not whining"

And that's just a lie.

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[zentigger]

Heck, why not take this one step further then. Since most telecom systems are digital nowadays The government wouldn't require a wiretap warrant for any phone calls either, because the carrier could be ordered to deliver the contents of the call jitter-buffer since the "data" is in storage on the phone switch, not in transit.

Explain this to me?

[fiercedeity085]

If ram is short term than only recent users ips will be logged, and not older users am I right. So why dont we just stop the American users from visiting the site?

Send the whole lot through to the other side...

[Anonymous Coward]

via The Route of Ages. Always worked for Capt. Dylan Hunt

Fortunately, that law was changed.

[Behrooz]

I could have sworn there was a law that requires judicial orders to be grounded in the realm of reality.
 
Fortunately, that law was changed, by judicial order.
 

RAM is storage!?

[HydroPhonic]

the moment you were served, if your machine was on ...(snip) doing something ...(snip) could be destruction of evidence. And failing to do anything would almost certainly result in said "evidence" being modified too.

Doesn't the definition of "storage" imply that the stored items are intended to be available "for future use", rather than for one-time use in the present?

Re:What's the problem? Ordered Recording!

[Snaller]

This includes data for which my server is not the intended recipient, as it has still been electronically stored on my system. For example, I could record the addresses of all emails that route through my server. And since this recording is my property, my consequent sale of said information to interested third parties is completely legal.

So if you route all torrent information through your machine you get to own all the movies, is that what you are saying?

How do they even plan to *DO* this?

[greenhaven]

That court may consider it just transferring the medium the document is contained in, but I don't believe that will hold up in court. First off, the idea of something scanning in near real time, for something that looks like it could plausibly be an IP isn't going to happen. I'd like to know how they're going to look through every byte of every process involved with networking. As I understand that, whenever anything was executed by the webserver daemon, the scanner would have to look through everything, the stack, and any structures in the memory of that process or thread. What if the daemon just starts? They'd have to find the pointer to the segment it's running in, look through the segment to find something that looks like a request from the server, try to find the IP address in it. What if the process spills over into a new segment? And all this has to be done before the packet is sent back to the client so that everything is logged! If whoever codes this isn't fast enough, does the poor sap running the box get slapped with a destruction of evidence charge? I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that most people are running this on a non realtime, multitasking system. What happens when this memory-snoop dameon doesn't have its turn to execute? What about any request that gets processed when MemorySnoop isn't running? Does whoever wrote the task scheduler get smacked with a Destruction of Evidence charge? Chances are, the task scheduler and memory management parts of the kernel are going to get patched. What if they use a non-free license, and we all have to get our kernels through them? What if Linus or rms sues, since they created a derivative work of the kernel and didn't license it under the kernel's license? Or is there going to be some sort of chip embedded in the hardware, and they have to get new motherboards, or get the chip implanted?

Also, this is assuming that the logging is even legal. IANAL, but under the COPPA act, if the person using the site is under 13, since the RIAA counts IP addresses as personally identifiable information, wouldn't collecting that IP from a child under 13 without parental consent be against the law? At the very least, I can see that getting thrown out of court for exactly that reason. Secondly, if they are simply regarding any packets involving torrentspy.com as attempting to infringe on a copyright, what about the people that hotlinked an image on a forum? Technically, that would be accessing the site, as I doubt it is possible to log everything involving that IP's transaction with the webserver daemon. Or what if someone links to the BitTorrent FAQ on there, to help out someone who wants to download legal material? If simply visiting torrentspy.com is going to be considered possible CI, I can see them pulling the First Amendment, as they could just be reading a news item or the FAQ, and their First Amendment rights being violated as everyone who goes to the site is considered guilty of CI. Just my .02$