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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
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