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TorrentSpy Must Preserve Data In RAM For MPAA
Transient writes "Reaffirming a magistrate's earlier decision, a federal judge has ordered TorrentSpy to begin keeping server logs as it defends itself against an MPAA lawsuit. In her opinion, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper interpreted federal discovery rules broadly. ' Judge Cooper took issue with TorrentSpy's argument that data in RAM is not "stored." She noted RAM's function as primary storage and that the storage of data in RAM — even if not permanently archived — makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules.' Given that TorrentSpy has limited access for users in the US, the ruling may be moot. But it does set a precedent for other, similar cases. 'Under this interpretation, any data stored in RAM could be subject to a subpoena, as at a basic level it is a "medium from which information can be obtained" just like a hard drive. '"
...as the data that is put into RAM is read and erased, can they (Torrentspy) be charged with destruction of evidence?
Living With a Nerd
So can they convict me for destroying evidence because I turned off my computer?
is what the Judge actually did to learn what RAM does and the suitable means to archive it. Was it the responsibility of the plantiff or TorrentSpy to educate her on what RAM actually does? Or was she left to her own devices as to how she sees RAM fitting into information storage, namely the sheer amount of data a single stick can hold?
import system.cool.Sig;
Doesn't Vista encrypt some of it's data in RAM (DRMd media etc)? If Apache was modified to set the memory used for logs to be DRMd, would this make the data inaccessible?
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
The goal here is not to have sensible law, it's to have laws that you can't avoid breaking. i.e. you're instantly guilty. Courts and police like this. Better "understanding" of the technology will just allow them to write nastier guilty-by-virtue-of-the-way-the-tech-works laws.
The only real solution is to become the people writing the laws. Support your local pirate party, I guess.
A more accurate statement would be that you write on the Post-Its, then at some point scribble all over them with a yellow ink pen and start writing something else. At some definite point, will you be able to produce the original text you wrote?
Except it is nothing like post its. It is more like you are using an etch a sketch to do your accounting and every new calculation, you shake it. Now you are required to write everything down.
Worse yet, what about a digital calculator.....you can't use one. You need to have one that prints out, etc.
... the contents of the RAM and send it to them COD. I wonder, how much a few thousand tons of paper costs to ship? That should keep them busy for a few hundred years.
People that don't know anything about a certain subject are making rules and precedents about it.
"It's en dem ma-sheeens! We git da masheeen, then we git who was a-stealin our movies! We will git us sum cypherers to figger out dis and weee'l put 'em all in jail!"
Ok, they don't all talk like that I'm sure. But you get my point. This is ridiculous and this judge and others that put this little gem of a ruling together should be openly ridiculed at every opportunity.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
How about giving them a complete memory dump of RAM, letting them sort out what the data is that interests them? Can the judge require them to preserve it in pretty formats?
This whole order is such an overreach by this judge, and the US Judicial system, that an immediate halt should be put to it this very instant.
And just suppose, btw for the sake of argument, that the country were TS is located prohibits export of personal data due to privacy laws? Then who wins?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Do you want to rank this judge's performance in a public manner? Visit The Robing Room and let your thoughts be heard. Just be sure to get her name and state correct. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, Federal Judge, California.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The real question I have to that statement is: why on earth were you trying to convince the prosecutor of anything? It's the Judge / Jury that needs to be convinced, not the prosecutor...
Really all they need to do is submit a random string of 0's and 1's. That is all memory contains, and it doesn't say anything about having to be readable by humans nor anything explaining how those 0's and 1's are segmented.
today is spelling optional day.
That's just it, isn't it? Claiming of territory in space is governed by some UN treaty as I recall. But that doesn't matter. If I go and somehow colonize Mars right now, I'm vulnerable to anybody who might want to take it from me. The only solution is to arm Mars to defend it, at which point any aggressor can either fight and lose, or fight and lose far more than Mars is worth to them. Either case makes it illogical to try and capture Mars, and therefore they have to work with Mars, not just invade it.
This is precisely why the world politica is divided into two groups: Nuclear and non-nuclear powers. If a country is a nuclear power, the rules change, because that country can inflict substantial damage to you, more than the country itself is probably worth.
In spite of all of the ramblings to the contrary, it isn't technically difficult to add a logging feature to a piece of s/w to collect and store IP addresses, or other sorts of data currently only held in RAM. This assumes that the operators of the service can either modify that s/w themselves, or contract the vendor of said s/w to add this logging feature. In the case of proprietary s/w, with licensing provisions prohibiting reverse-engineering or modification, the latter may be the only recourse.
Now, lets suppose the operators of TorrentSpy contact the vendor, request that logging be added per the court's request and the vendor replies, "No".
Have gnu, will travel.
Alternatively you can realise that it's a miracle it actually compiled at all considering it was typed into a c textbox on a web page.
But anyway:
It's impossible to say because your seven line program contains at least one bug. (I'm assuming that the presented program is C and not some imaginary language).
If you can't determine intent from those seven lines (and hence the answer to the question) you truly are retarded. Must be wonderful to actually be dumber than the average C compiler.
Firstly, although you've correctly specified that main() should return an "int" you are actually returning a value of "size_t" which may or may not be defined as "int", depending on the platform
Please to be looking up "automatic type conversion".
Secondly, you haven't checked the return value of fgets(). On error, fgets() returns NULL. This isn't necessarily the same as the nul character so depending on the platform, strlen() may fail (possibly even catastrophically on certain machines, such as the DeathStation 5000).
strlen never sees the return value of fgets so the fact that NULL and nul are different is completely irrelevent. I guess you think the return value magically ends up in buf because you are a moron or something?
If fgets fails the program crashes after printing out random crap, which is perfectly reasonable behaviour - why try to hide that something is wrong?
You've used the strlen() function without including its proper header.
If you assume that snippet is the entire program yes. And if you assume it's compiled independantly of other files and compiler/etc options. Both those assumptions are wrong of course, but don't let that slow you down.
Lastly, although this isn't really an error but it does demonstrate your inexperience, you have enclosed "buf" in parenthesis in the sizeof expression. Remember, sizeof is an operator not a function. The only reason you would ever use parenthesis in conjunction with sizeof is if you were asking for the size of a datatype. For example "sizeof(int)" or "sizeof(*char)". Using parenthesis any other time would be equivalent to expressing a simple sum as "(1) + (2) == (3)". Not incorrect, but pointless.
There's also the point that it the parenthesis make for more readable code in the case of sizeof. And every style I've ever been cursed enough to have to write C in has included always using the parens.
Remember, C isn't for amateurs. That's why high-level languages were invented. To demonstrate how difficult it is to effectively program in C, I've deliberately left a bug in of my own as well as a potentially confusing design issue. See if you can find them.
"a bug", there's more there one.
1. You missed a ;
2. If fgets returns NULL, NULL == n can still return false.
3. You return something other than EXIT_SUCCESS or EXIT_FAILURE from main.
There are more issues with using an int instead of a char* for storing that return value, but they really all boil down to the same thing. I can't be bothered looking further 3>1 already.
Walk over and pull the plug!
Now see what's stored!
Stupid Judges and their ignorance.
Data is no more "stored" in RAM than light is "stored" in a bulb.
Science tells us that data currently in RAM is ultra-temporary and in a lot of cases prone to error.
They're using their grammar skills there.
strangely, the way I see the law, the judge is right on this. just because it is volatile, does not mean it is any less incriminating.
the problem here is(are) the law(s), not the judge's interpretation.
copyright is completely out of control, and *NO* reasonable discussion on any issue regarding rights for copyright holders has merit (IMHO) until the copyright terms are fixed - meaning, significantly reduced. I don't advocate copyright elimination - it is valid and useful thing to have - just that the tampering with the law by these big companies has given them exactly the opposite that they expected - they have people who don't take it seriously because it is so far skewed against the public interest.
On a long enough time scale, everything balances.
It's a good thing you're not their lawyer, or you'd get them in a lot of trouble.
I don't get the attempted denial of the request in the first place. Yes, for space reasons you might not log traffic on your site, but when a judge tells you to, why the hell would you think that it being in RAM and not disk would make it immune from subpeona? Just buy another hard drive and start logging the relevant data.
And if you actually gave them a actual recording of all the data going into RAM in a way that could be replayed step-by-step (Not possible without a VM, I know), they would probably be okay with that.
TorrentSpy should put a NAT in front of their servers that obfuscate all of the IP addresses sent to their servers.
:)
:-)
The discovery order (to my understanding) is limited to the Torrent Servers and hasn't been made applicable to any new hardware.
Then TorrentSpy could hand over a log full of network 10 addresses with impunity
Oh, and the placement of the NAT would need to be kept quiet (lest the nasty blighters ask for discovery on that too!) and of course not keep any log information on disk by default