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Judge Orders Piracy Trial To Test IP Address Evidence
another random user sends word of a case in Pennsylvania District Court in which Judge Michael Baylson has ordered a trial to resolve the issue of whether an IP address can identify a particular person. The plaintiff, Malibu Media, has filed 349 lawsuits against groups of alleged infringers, arguing that getting subscriber information from an ISP based on an IP address that participated in file-sharing was suitable for identification purposes. A motion filed by the defendants in this case explains "how computer-based technology would allow non-subscribers to access a particular IP address," leading Judge Baylson to rule that a trial is "necessary to find the truth."
"The Bellwether trial will be the first time that actual evidence against alleged BitTorrent infringers is tested in court. This is relevant because the main piece of evidence the copyright holders have is an IP-address, which by itself doesn't identify a person but merely a connection. ... Considering what's at stake, it would be no surprise if parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are willing to join in. They are known to get involved in crucial copyright troll cases, siding with the defendants. We asked the group for a comment, but have yet to receive a response. On the other side, Malibu Media may get help from other copyright holders who are engaged in mass-BitTorrent lawsuits. A ruling against the copyright holder may severely obstruct the thus far lucrative settlement business model, meaning that millions of dollars are at stake for these companies. Without a doubt, the trial is expected to set an important precedent for the future of mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the U.S. One to watch for sure."
They can defend against this and finally put an end to all the crazy lawsuits
An IP address will identify a connection, that someone is responsible for.
There is plenty of cases of Person A committing a crime or getting into an accident, using something from Person B, and Person B getting into trouble as a result.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
People can share IP addresses, but only twins share DNA?
That is the ultimate ruling that will result from this. Don't delude yourself into thinking it will end any other way.
oh god i sure as hell hope my VPN provider doesn't respnd to legal threats.
wait, was i even connected?
oh god
Faulty analogy. I could temporarily use your internet connection to download something if you leave your wifi unsecured (or inadequately secured... for those who still use WEP). I can't hijack your body and use it to commit a crime that can be traced back to you through DNA evidence.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
From the comfort of my living room I can connect to no fewer than 6 access points that don't belong to me. 2 more if I wanted to take 5 minutes to crack a few WEP passwords. If I had a mind to I could use them to download movies, music. If I really wanted to cause trouble there are plenty of worse things I could do.
There would be absolutely no way to trace that activity back to me, and the people taking the blame would be guilty of no other crime than not understanding how networks operate.
Spoofing another person's DNA would be *slightly* more challenging.
Your DNA can get nearly anywhere very easily. If you get unlucky, you could be framed for a crime or at least it will appear that you did the crime.
DNA isn't as accurate as some make it out to be.
An IP address can _help_ positively identify a person. :) ).
;).
It can definitely negatively identify a person - if the public IP is different it wasn't you doing it (assuming you weren't using that public IP
If the download was made by the IP of your internet connection at that time, then it's evidence that something using your connection was doing the downloading. If they find other corroborating evidence that it's you - e.g. the downloaded file is on your computer, in your personal folders, shows up in your download history, the computer is not normally shared, there's no malware or remote control software, then it's likely to be downloaded by you.
But an IP sure isn't sufficient alone in itself. The **AA probably want it to be like a car license plate in certain countries - where if a camera takes a picture of a car breaking a traffic speed limit, that has the same plate as your car, looks like your car, then they expect you to either pay the (usually smaller) fine or identify the person responsible so that they can do it. Or challenge it in court and pay the full fine.
However in this case they want huge fines and the fines to go to them
Given the fact that wi-fi is so predominant these days and the fact that several access points are left unsecured as well as the fact that any particular access point routes to one of a number of IP addresses belonging to the same subscriber, an IP address is not a reliable way of determining who actually downloaded things illegally.
I have been a captive in America my entire life. Everybody and everything uses customary units instead of metric.
DNA stores a lot more information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4
Right there in the Addressing section. 4.3 billion addresses for 8+ billion people's devices, so we share them.
Yes you can. You can easily 'hijack' DNA from someone and plant it at the scene of your crime. Hair clippings, skin flakes, spit. You could even use it to commit the crime if you so desired, but you'll need a fair bit of hair to choke a full grown man. Could be fun though.
It's a bit like finding the get away car for the bank job in your house and all the neighbors agree you use it to drive to work.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"There would be absolutely no way to trace that activity back to me,"
Some routers/firewalls do log the MAC address, so they COULD trace it back to you.
People can share IP addresses, but only twins share DNA?
Eww, incest is gross.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
IF this spells the death of the It's-your-ip-so-that-means-you-did-it argument, then I can see Tor exit-node hosting becoming a lot more popular in the USA. On the other hand, if it is not, then ...
Sent from my ENIAC
This isn't the smoking gun you might be thinking it is. Until now, most piracy claims have been prosecuted under the idea that infringement must be willful. In other words, the prosecution has to prove intent. If you accidentally download, or stumble home late one night and while fumbling for the lights, happen to push the "download 300 gigabytes of copyrighted porn" button, intent is not satisfied. Of course, it's pretty hard to prove intent looking at network traffic -- how can you tell the difference between an action initiated by a human, and an action initiated by a computer program? Even if you can prove it's a human, can you prove which one? Digital forensics is still in its infancy, and it has clear and compelling limitations.
That's why, (drum roll please), we have crimes of strict liability. For example, possession of stolen property. Doesn't matter if you knew it was stolen. Doesn't matter if you checked all the registries for stolen products, the serial numbers -- there is simply no defense in cases of strict liability. It was found on your person or on your property and ta-da, guilty. I'll let someone with a more legal background get into why this is bad if they want in a reply, but short answer: Yes, it's abused. No, it won't stop anytime soon. This is what file sharing is moving towards -- you no longer have to prove intent, the act itself is now grounds to throw you in prison or fine you more than acts of major depravity, terrorism, murder, etc., would net you. Again, not how strict liability was sold when it came out, but that's how the way the doughnut's rolling these days.
What I'm getting at is that IP addresses might legally become evidence that the account holder did it... or it may not. But either way, it's still probable cause to search your computer, person, property, etc., and if they find ye ole pirate treasure, you're going to be just as screwed. And as a bonus, if you encrypt it or otherwise protect it from being searched, odds are good they'll tack on additional criminal charges as well, or simply hold you in contempt of court, which means indefinite jail time without appeal, trial, etc., for failing to surrender the encryption keys... even if you can prove a sudden case of total amnesia and are now a glorified vegetable who's main mode of communication is drool, you might still be rotting in jail the rest of your life.
God bless America.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
because in my home as many as 10 people can be using the same internet connection thus sharing the same ip address ... meaning there is ALWAYS reasonable doubt as to who did the downloading.
additionally the ip addresss supplied by the ISP can and will change from time to time ... meaning that you cant even be certain the downloading occured at my location
The MAC address is only available on the home router. Home routers tend not to log this kind of information, because it would involve infrequent writes of small amounts of data to flash storage, which is a really great way to make it fail quickly. So in pretty much any case where the network wouldn't be secure, there would be no record of the MAC address.
Also, it's trivial to spoof a MAC address. E.g., just run bittorrent in a vmware virtual machine, and then blow it away when you're done—evidence gone, and the log will show that you are innocent.
The bottom line is that trusting IP addresses as personal identifiers is a really bad idea, which causes a great deal of social harm for a very small social benefit.
Unfortunately the standard in civil cases is "a preponderance of evidence," not "no reasonable doubt."
MAC addresses can be spoofed very easily. Even if it isn't spoofed, MAC addresses generally can't be traced, they can only be used to confirm a match once the suspect has been traced by other means.
Even WPA2 can be broken into. there is little security with WiFi. I do not care too much as my machine is secured (I run linux and the machine has been hardened to stop script kiddies), so I do run wifi with WPA2 and also require MAC address authentication, but I know thta if my machine were a commercial machine with trade secrets, I would have to remove the wireless card.
Plus, you don't even need to actually download anything to frame someone, as can be seen here: http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/.
Time to start squeezing Jury Nullification pamphlets into every bit-torrent file. Hmm. There's an idea; can anyone whip up a Jury Nullification badge for websites?
It can't identify a specific person. At all. The pigeonhole principle proves it irrefutably, since there are 4 billion possible IP's, but roughly 7 billion people on the planet. It is therefore impossible for an IP to uniquely identify an individual.
Although admittedly that particular argument isn't valid for IPv6... it's still true for a vast majority of IP addresses right now. Even under IPv6, however, it will probably still be the case unless (or until) we start directly associating unique IP's with particular people regardless of what kind of device they are utilizing, you still won't be able to associate an IP address with a particular person. At best, you can get only the subscriber who leased that IP. This may or may not be the individual, but an argument can be made (one that I don't fully agree with, but can see some valid reasoning behind) that a subscriber could be held accountable for activities on his or her subscription that they ought to have had the ability to supervise and approve of.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
and the people taking the blame would be guilty of no other crime than not understanding how networks operate.
Actually, they may understanding completely how networks operate, but have a device that requires the use of WEP (older wifi-enabled printers, anyone?). Don't assume that because something isn't secured to some arbitrary amount that the person who secured it was uneducated.
Also, there is some data left behind that could link it to you: Until the router is rebooted, it will probably maintain an ARP record (if not also a DHCP lease) in the memory of the device. That record will contain the MAC address of your wifi card, and possibly your computer name as well. People can and have been busted for this when, say, sending a death threat to the President. It turns out, the secret service does know a thing or two about this, and they pride themselves on doing anything necessary to find you, even if that means confinscating every computer in a given radius of that wifi router and comparing trace records to forensic data on each computer. Oh, and incase you're wondering -- as a matter of fact, no, the 4th amendment doesn't really apply when it comes to death threats against the president. Or any other law for that matter... they will find you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The IP is the car.. yes, someone owns the car or might be responsible for the car at a particular time, but they may or may not be driving it.
Not only that, but the current testing methodology is questionable. Instead of matching the whole DNA sequence, they use a series of markers that a private company decided uniquely identifies a person. There is no evidence to support this. The statistical probabilities given that someone has the same DNA are based on the completely unsupported assertion that there is no genetic relation between these markers.
Not too many people have katana's, not too many people keep chopsticks in their silverware drawer. So you could argue that someone having both these things makes it highly unlikely the suspect is the killer. In reality, I'd venture most everyone with a katana also has chopsticks. Having both is slightly more statistically unique than having one but it is nowhere near as distinct as the individual probabilities of having these items would suggest. The same may well be true of these markers or of certain value combinations of them.
I wouldn't buy something based on a companies claim of statistical success because it is too easy to use selective information and to spin results. Why are we using this same kind of data to send people to prison.
Usually, DNA is enough to strongly link a person or persons to a scene, just like usually an IP is strong enough to link a person or persons to a scene.
Whether there's anything more than a correlation between those links is part of the job of law enforcement and the judiciary to sort out.
There are also many cases where there are strong doubts regarding the link between DNA or IP and a person being more than happenstance in a given situation.
The analogy is far better than many seen on Slashdot.
Lame joke. There is nothing gross about two hot twins going at it or a 3way with the same. Arguably the hottest thing ever.
Great tactic. MAC addresses are bulletproof and can in no way be spoofed.
DNA shouldn't. Just because DNA is accepted where it shouldn't be doesn't mean IP's should be.
But at least DNA doesnt change every 2 weeks.
Some routers/firewalls do log the MAC address, so they COULD trace it back to you.
Bullshit. If I was going to use someone else's Internet connection for illegal activities, don't you suppose it might be a good idea to take 2 seconds to run a script that will switch me to a randomly generated MAC?
The only way to get caught would be for someone to pin down the radio signal while the connection was in process. Once the activities were complete, there would be no traceable evidence to be had.
MAC authentication is absolutely, literally, worthless from a security standpoint if you are using WPA2. Anyone who has the capability to crack WPA2 will necessarily have the ability to impersonate your MAC-- it is, I believe, a requirement to mount an attack against WPA2 in the first place. The fact that you have MAC auth turned on would probably not even be noticed by an attacker, and if it were, it would take all of about 5 seconds to get around.
I would say that a 1 in 10 chance that the named individual was the one at that IP address at the time falls short of preponderance of the evidence. Throw in that someone might hop on their WiFi (invited or not), might spoof their address with a hacked cable modem, might use a compromized PC as a relay, or the ISPs logs may be wrong about who had the IP when, and IP address is looking like an absolutely terrible way to identify a particular person.
The problem is NAT and DHCP, for which there are no parallels for with DNA.
NAT means that multiple individuals can share a single public IP, and short of the home router having logs, there is no way to differentiate between the computers behind the router based on their public IP.
DHCP means that not only might someone else have had your IP yesterday, but you might not even have your IP tomorrow, and the private IPs behind the NAT will likely shift as well.
Combined, the two of them MIGHT make an IP address sufficient for probable cause, but definitely not as a unique identifier.
most that do lose it on reboot. You would specifically need to configure the device to have correct date/time (which I doubt most do), and specify nonvolatile storage for the logs (which Im quite sure most dont do).
They really cant confirm anything without a router or switch log. MAC address info doesnt leave the local subnet, and is simply not accessible from behind a home router.
In fact, if a person wanted to be really nasty about it, the following would be trivial to do:
1.) I passively monitor your WLAN in the evening.
2.) In the morning you leave for work, taking your laptop with you.
3.) I assign YOUR mac address to my pc and go about my illicit business.
Police come knocking on your door, check log files if your router has them, and right there in the logs is YOUR mac address from YOUR laptop correlated with the illegal activity.
Anyone who understands wireless networking, even a little, should know that the thought of an IP address being considered legal proof of identity is an absolutely TERRIFYING concept.
If DNA can
For a long time, DNA couldn't, but nobody bothered to question the prosecutors when they had an N-point match and their lab guy said it must be the right person. Some researcher decided to run through the DNA fingerprints on a lark and see how many people matched each other and suddenly there were dozens of "one in 113 billion" 9 loci matches and all the prosecutors started running helter skelter around screaming "no you aren't supposed to use it this way! Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain finding dozens of people with nine loci matches! Make her stop! Make her stoooooooop!" (cite: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/20/local/me-dna20 )
These days though, the DNA technicians just swear in then lie in court rather than bothering to do the work. Hey, if the prosecutor thinks they're guilty they probably are, and when they're caught its not like the DA is going to press perjury charges against the star witness. (cite: http://www.google.com/search?q=crime+lab+dna+scandal&gs_l=news )
NATcest is best!
ARP records are flushed periodically, and arent really meant for logging. Theyre stored in RAM in basically every OS AFAIK, and would be lost on reboot. ARP records would NOT contain your computer name-- only IP and mac-- but thats not even foolproof. While the MAC address of a NIC can be tedious to alter, it is absolutely trivial to poison an arp cache so that bogus information appears in the cache.
The idea that ARP caches have been used to bust people I find rather hard to believe, since ARP is a layer 2 protocol and would not be leaked when sending ie a death threat to the president-- once those packets hit your router, the layer 2 information is stripped out and rewritten with the router's own info, which is then stripped and rewritten at the next hop. Only layer 3 information survives, and only until it hits a NATting router at which point that, too, is stripped.
Cases where people are busted tend to involve ISPs who can pull up logs of who owned what public IP, and that then leads to a warrant which allows a physical search, leading to incriminating evidence on the home computer. But in the absence of such evidence, there would be no way from a network standpoint to prove whether the owner of that connection had actually committed the crime in question.
Yes, the 4th amendment still applies, but that doesnt mean a warrant cannot be issues. The 4th amendment specifically lays out circumstances in which your "right to be secure in person, houses, papers, and effects" may be violated.
People can share IP addresses, but only twins share DNA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)#Human_chimeras
MAC addresses can be changed.
While the MAC address of a NIC can be tedious to alter
1.) Boot a backtrack iso
2.) Run macchanger -r eth0
There you go, you're now operating under a randomly generated MAC address.
Not too tedious, IMHO.
I can't hijack your body and use it to commit a crime that can be traced back to you through DNA evidence.
You are right. YOU can't do it. You are so lame.
morcego
NATcest is best!
Put your router to the test!!
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
But at least DNA doesnt change every 2 weeks.
Logs will show who had which IP at which time. This is a non-issue.
I want to believe the court will rule that IP addresses don't prove which person used the equipment which held the address. It is consistent with how we treat cars, license plates, and drivers. Your plate is not enough for say a traffic offence, because you may not have been driving.
But I just can't justify faith in the system anymore. Honestly if I was going to bet a large percentage of my money on this, I would bet on the most authoritarian or fascist outcome possible. I would bet that the copyright cartels will get their way, even if the judge is fully aware this will result in innocent people being blamed for infringement they didn't actually do. Sadly I would probably win that bet. The courts have long ago decided that elaborate legal theories are more important than preserving and defending liberty.
I guess judges assume they are in the ruling/political class so the fascist laws they keep validating will never be used against them personally? That makes it okay, right? Somehow, in their minds? Just like so many politicians assume the massive debt won't be a real problem until long after they're out of power, so that makes it okay to them. The lowest worm or maggot is better than these people because it can't help being what it is. These people choose to be what they are.
Instead of matching the whole DNA sequence, they use a series of markers that a private company decided uniquely identifies a person. There is no evidence to support this.
What private company? And nobody has asserted that it matches a unique person, but that it's a 99.something% match. Run that through a database containing everyone on the planet, and you get a few million positive hits, all but one an error. But that's great reliability. If you run it against the top 10 suspects, then you have better than a 99% chance it's the one that you got the match on. That's enough for a conviction, in most cases.
Learn to love Alaska
ISP have messed up ip tracking as well metering so what a ISP says may not hold up in court.
There lot's of old cases of that hear on Slashdot.
Your plate is not enough for say a traffic offence, because you may not have been driving.
I should have made the reference more clear. This came up when red-light cameras became more common. People would often get out of the tickets because the camera only caught the plate, there was no photo showing who was driving. Like a car, a router holding an IP address can be used by multiple people. Unlike a car, said router can be used by many people _at the same time_. That alone isn't proof of who did what.
NAT only works if they are on your network. Why are they on your network? And DHCP means nothing. Most carriers don't use DHCP. PPPoE and such, maybe. And they know what IP you had at the time of the "offense". There are things called "logs". The lumberjacks roll on them in rivers.
Learn to love Alaska
ARP records would NOT contain your computer name
*facepalm* I also mentioned the DHCP lease data, which would. You missed that.
The idea that ARP caches have been used to bust people I find rather hard to believe, since...
Since you can't imagine a death threat being sent and then the secret service not showing up ASAP? You think they just sit around going "hmm, should we deal with this now, or after tea and crumpets?" No -- their response time is in hours. It's a job requirement that their sense of humor be surgically removed. The ARP data will likely still be in RAM, and yes, you crack open the device, and then remove the ram (or hook clips up to the debugging ports, etc., while it is powered on), chill it, and transfer it to a reader device to extract its contents. This is not theoretical: This has been proven, the people who wrote TrueCrypt describe this particular attack in great detail in their disclaimers and limitations documentation.
And yes, there are workarounds, there are always workarounds... But are dozens of things you need to do to cover your trail, and each of those things that you do reduce the pool of potential suspects. As well, you aren't considering the other evidence that may be available -- a witness to your car being parked outside a few hours before the guys with shotguns showing up, for example. The home security camera on the neighbor's house you didn't notice. The ANPR system of the gas station you drove by on the way to the street you parked outside of. The list goes on.
Only layer 3 information survives, and only until it hits a NATting router at which point that, too, is stripped.
Yes, congratulations, you have a basic understanding of protocols. But you apparently don't understand implimentation of them in hardware, software, and firmware very well, and you're even worse at looking at the total system -- which includes things like statistical analysis, looking at words and speech patterns, timing delays in the data, other data your computer may accidentally chirp (like windows update, which sends a GUID). There's a hundred ways they can hang you -- and you only need to screwup once. Even NAT leaves traces in memory -- All it requires is a single missed ACK during the close of a TCP session, or sending any UDP data, and the state table data may remain there for minutes, hours, even days. Many NAT implimentations in firmware have problems with memory leaks caused by faulty code. Guess what's in the leak?
Cases where people are busted tend to involve ISPs who can pull up logs of who owned what public IP, and that then leads to a warrant which allows a physical search, leading to incriminating evidence on the home computer. But in the absence of such evidence...
All ISPs are required by law to store that data; They have had to for years. Also, the government has been consolidating existing wiretapping efforts into a supermassive data center intended to store detailed and comprehensive records of all communications on the internet domestically. They don't necessarily need the ISP's assistance -- though it may speed up the execution of a search warrant.
Yes, the 4th amendment still applies, but that doesnt mean a warrant cannot be issues. The 4th amendment specifically lays out circumstances in which your "right to be secure in person, houses, papers, and effects" may be violated.
You made a terroristic threat. Maybe you missed the memo, but since 9/11, all you need to do is mention the word 'terrorist' and you have no civil rights. They're detaining people in Guantanamo and elsewhere in the world without trial or charges being brought against them. A guy who merely accidentally bumped into the President spent several months in jail without a trial just last year. A government that has spent many trillions of dollars and bankrupted itself to protect against terrorism is not going to be held up by some internet critic's interpretation of the fourth amendment. The word "unreasonable" will be made to be amazingly elastic if you decide to attempt the aforementioned crime.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The only secure wireless is an off wireless. But IP matching is much much more reliable than the slashdot crowd would have you think.
Learn to love Alaska
In windows, if you have a "good" driver, open the device properties. Go to the advanced tab. Set the MAC to whatever you like. You don't need to boot a new OS to do so.
Learn to love Alaska
And aliens could have come down from the sky, broken into his house, and used his computer to download Rhianna, then left without a trace.
And the consequence of pushing your line of thought is French or NZ style laws where the connection is at fault, and the owner of the connection gets a fine and the connection turned off. No criminal liability. No trials. Simple, and no fault assigned.
Learn to love Alaska
but a IP can be like take any car in the row and they don't do that good of a job of keeping records on who had what car. Also replace car with say a group of seats that can be used my more then one person. Poor analogy but think of it like this you are paying for X space (bandwidth) and you can use it all on your own or others can also use open space at the same time.
Because wireless access points? And even 'secured' access points are trivial to access with the right software?
I am John Hurt.
Indeed, but I imagine in the near future, it will be trivial to frame someone using that very kind of evidence.
You'd be amazed how much DNA human beings shed on a daily basis. And how trivial it is to grab a randomly discarded hair-brush, using the hair / skin on it to contaminate a crime scene. We all know the DA will never question it, the judge certainly won't, and the defendant, of course, no one believes.
Donate blood? Good, good. Perhaps you also cut your hand when you broke that glass on the jewelery store window last night, and left a little blood on it. With such an obvious treat like that, no forensics team or police investigator would question it.
But we all know things like that simply don't happen in this world. It's all pure fantasy...
I am John Hurt.
Because Mac addresses aren't unique by a long shot?
I am John Hurt.
The difference between my examples and yours is that the ones I mentioned actually DO happen. What world is it you live in where everyone correctly secures their PC and WiFi and never leaks a password?
The DNA tests are fine. The problem is that too many people watch CSI and don't know what statistics mean.
While 100% accurate, the problem is that part of these "too many people" are the police, the judges and jury.
What private company? And nobody has asserted that it matches a unique person,
Ahem ahem ahem.
I'm sorry, I was caught by a sudden cough. Do continue...
but that it's a 99.something% match. Run that through a database containing everyone on the planet, and you get a few million positive hits, all but one an error. But that's great reliability. If you run it against the top 10 suspects, then you have better than a 99% chance it's the one that you got the match on. That's enough for a conviction, in most cases.
Yes, I completely agree. Unfortunately, while you show much clue in the field of statistics, you show very little clue in the field of human behavior.
DNA is routinely used, not to narrow down the suspects pool, but in order to find the suspect to begin with. That is why DNA databases are so lucrative for law enforcement. Quite often, a finger gets pointed at someone because police already had his DNA for an unrelated reason. As I'm sure you understand, this kind of use is precisely the kind where GP's concerns are justified.
Shachar
Not in Maryland, the tag is enough to identify you for the issuance of citations for speeding, traffic lights and soon, stop sign cameras.
OK... so there are plenty of posts here outlining that using IP addresses as evidence is extremely unreliable at best.
MAC's can be spoofed; networks can be hacked, then there's DHCP and NAT etc etc etc.
Honest question: Given that there are this many holes in putting forward an IP address as proof of illegal downloading/copyright infringement WHY THE FUCK isn't it laughed out of court??
I can only think of 2 options:
1. The judiciary have no clue about these issues and are not being educated on them - if so, why aren't they making it their business to understand these pitfalls?
2. THe legal system prefers to just push all responsibility for network security onto generally clueless service owners - if so, why aren't these innocents presenting this apparently basic information to court?
THis situation is just so moronic that I'm struggling to believe it is actually happening.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
If you live in a place with strict liability laws for Internet connections, why are you leaving your wireless on 24/7? If you are responsible for it, then secure it properly (even if that means off) or accept the consequences of your negligence.
Learn to love Alaska
No, IP addresses have alreadyd been ruled to only identify an address at a current time. You cannot use it to identify a specific person which is precisely what this case is about.
I see you still can't hijack their bodies, and need to use technical measures.
Please return your evil overlord card.
morcego
Anybody who cares about it runs their connection through a VPN anyways. And that's probably always going to be the case as the folks creating the standards for WiFi have a tendency to not include cryptographers and security researchers in the process.
If DNA can, why not IP? Is this a question of fact or law?
Ever been to Starbucks? Hell, any internet cafe. At any given time you've got many people sharing IP addresses. Why is this issue even being debated?
they won't need to subpoena the ISP's logs anymore because your IPv6 address identifies the household that where the connection originated.
What remains is the open WiFi defense, so expect them to legislate against it. You will be liable for your wireless router like you're liable for your firearms.
Usually, DNA is enough to strongly link a person or persons to a scene, just like usually an IP is strong enough to link a person or persons to a scene.
Except that in this case, the plaintiff likely presented only a list of IP addresses, dates and a name of a torrent. I can create a list like that in a few minutes using Excel and the "RAND()" function. The relatively strict rules that apply to collection and custody of evidence like DNA samples is nowhere to be found in these copyright cases.
The whole point of these cases is not to go to trial, but rather to get a payout with little expenditure of money. Most of the firms that are pursuing these sorts of cases just ignore ones that have any opposition after they get contact information. Almost every case that actually involves a trial is about fighting to be allowed to easily obtain contact information and send extortion letters.
So, if the stats about file sharing are accurate, using randomly generated IP addresses and times in the initial discovery request would likely never be uncovered, because there would be enough people who are scared into settling. This is especially true in this case, where porn is involved. As long as the contact info they get hits people who downloaded porn (any porn), they're likely to get a decent settlement rate.
The only way to get real evidence of file sharing is too much work for the payout, as the copyright holder would have to download a relatively large chunk of the infringed work (or possibly all of it if it was a split RAR file) from every defendant's computer. This would require a well-behaved torrent client (to avoid things like disconnection for bad data) but modified to store each copy of the downloaded data separately, and to never upload (since uploading would be similar to entrapment in a criminal case). Next, the computer used to do this downloading would have to be in some way "frozen" to keep from altering any of the proof, while still allowing access to that proof for generation of the lawsuit. Last, the copyright holder would have to allow experts for the defense access to the "frozen" computer that was used to do the downloading.
Can't find my link to the youtube video about the guy who is hot for this chick, turns out to be his sister, then turns out this asshole trying to chase them in the Mystery Machine is really their dad.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Run that through a database containing everyone on the planet, and you get a few million positive hits, all but one an error.
No you won't. There are 13 standard Loci with something like 10 Alleles or more at each marker. So that is something like the chance of a "random" match as one in 10^-12. This is both correct and wrong. First many of these 13 markers have more than 10 alleles and the provability is closer to something like 10^-15. Its wrong in that its not random, you share about 50% of these markers with your father for example. Even population wide this does reduce the randomness. Then there is a birthday paradox. But that does not apply in this case since you are matching the database to a given profile. So with 7 billion humans in the database, chances are that there is just one hit. Not millions. You would be very lucky to get more than one.
When comparing to a 100 suspects that are not related (remember the profile will tell us if they are related.) You are more like 99.99999999% sure. Even far more than that.
Yes this is directly related to my day job.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
"it is absolutely trivial to poison an arp cache so that bogus information appears in the cache."
Indeed. This is how WifiKill works, much to the annoyance of MacBook users in cafés I frequent.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Is #2 required?
My old wardriving rig had a new MAC address from a randomly selected vendor every time it booted up. Hell, the only consistent thing about it would've been the fact that it intentionally excluded two of the medium-common vendors -- one being its own, the other being an extra exclusion to not be blatantly obvious if it was ever tracked.
It's a basic command that can be ran on nearly any decent linux system that doesn't have a completely crap card.
MAC filtering is about as valuable as locks on car doors -- except at least if someone smashes your car, there's blatant evidence afterwards. With MAC cloning, the only evidence you might have is an interruption of service if you happened to be on at the same time. And that's only if your attacker was naive, or the network was configured better than most ones are in reality. Thank you arpping.
Yes, you should use MAC filtering, for the same reason you should lock the front door to your house. But you shouldn't count on it to protect you from anyone but utter incompetents.
Off often isn't an option. Especially where there is the highest chances of the wi-fi being intercepted. Your idea of diligence doesn't seem to mesh with real-world practicality.
Now I'm not saying that IP address shouldn't be used, but it probably will need support with other evidence.
There is a difference between negligence and committing a crime. The courts here are trying to decide if a crime was committed. If the owner of the network was criminally negligent then that would be a different charge than the crime itself.
The burden of proof generally rests on the accuser.
> Most carriers don't use DHCP. PPPoE and such, maybe.
USA is a weird place. All of the major ISPs in Finland have been using DHCP for years. Majority of small ones as well. Heck, I have had broadband for ~12 years & I have never used it.
If you get unlucky, you could be framed for a crime or at least it will appear that you did the crime.
People make it always sound like you drop the hair of someone at a crimescene and WHAM, straight to jail. Framing someone for a crime is hard work, with lots and lots of stuff which needs to be taken into account. Placing someones DNA at the crimescene is only one part of a big puzzle.
Cunningly, the UK seem to have got around this issue. The letter you get when caught by a speed camera specifically asks who was driving. It has some FAQs on it. One of those FAQs is "what if I don't know who was driving", and the answer they give is something along the lines of "you are legally required to tell us who was driving". So there you go, they are stating that if you don't know who was driving you have a legal obligation to commit purgury.
(I don't actually know what the legal standing of this is, but to find out you would need to go to court, and the penalties for taking a speeding fine to court and losing are so high, most people just accept the points and fine even if they are innocent)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Actually if you can reasonably show you are unaware of who was driving, you CAN return the NIP (notice of intention to prosecute) with said information.
Commonly accepted defences include:
1) Not receiving the NIP in a timely manner - usually receipt outside of 14 days will be accepted here
2) Large number of potential drivers in a "pool" situation. A police force used that excuse when a panda was flashed - they hadnt maintained driver records so could not, with any certainty, point to who was driving at that time.
It is interestingly one of the few ECHR upheld limitations on the right to not self incriminate - you can be forced, under penalty of suffering the same penalty as the offence alledged, to name yourself as the driver
IANAL, just had a couple brushes in the past with the system ;)
Which is why, if used correctly, it is *a* piece of evidence, not *the* piece of evidence. To go with the DNA analogy, which seems to have become the new 'car analogy' on slashdot: what if the lab messes up? Mistakes happen.
I saw a story once where some guy got busted for a fairly minor crime, but they collected his DNA and ran it. Bang, hit on a 30 year old cold case where someone had been killed in a cemetary, blood collected from a gravestone. Guy pleads his innocence. Turns out they got two hits from that gravestone, and the other hit was a guy who had been 4 years old when the crime was committed. Something's messed up, right? So it turns out the common denominator was that all three DNA samples were run by the same lab in the same week - the cold-case sample from the gravestone, the guy who got accused of the murder, *and* the 4 year old (who had since grown up) and was also arrested that week. Clearly all three samples were co-contaminated, right? Not according to the lab director, since they don't make mistakes. And the jury returned a guilty.
Point is, even DNA isn't foolproof. Neither is an IP. Both are helpful, neither is sufficient. But just like if your DNA shows up at a crime scene, if your IP is involved with copyright violation, you can expect to be making a lawyer's car payments, even if you're ultimately exonerated. Good reason to secure your networks.
MAC access authentication is good for most situations.
Yes, there are always those hackers who know everything and they study by testing without causing damage to others and crackers who cause damage to others by stealing information or doing bad things trough others computers.
BUT, look around. Look where you live and think how many crackers lives as your neighbor?
Yeah, thats right. The change for that is very limited.
I use MAC access authentication only, because I want only to rule out what devices gets connected to family network, but I don't want encryption to slow down the connection in that environment by 10-20% (tested).
Some house visitors are blocked by that what is a nice thing but when there are only two neighbors and both are about 100m away and signal is just strong enough for their front yard to get minute or two connection before disconnection, encryption isn't needed at all.
Padlocks, door locks, car locks etc are easy to pick or get trough. But when avarage person can not get trough by the lock in the first place, they use rock, hammer or something else to brake the glass or framing and get trough if they want, it doesn't help at all to have top class lock what professional thief can not pass in one minute.
Heck, "Locks are for honest people". It is just a sign "Please, do not go there, even if you are curious person".
Network encryption and access technic are exactly like that. Only for against curious people. If media company X wants to get access to my network traffic, they don't need to come even close my home. They simply needs to have a friend at ISP, if a engineer who can do that or CEO who orders someone to do that, and thats it.
ISP can lurk every data connection what comes and goes to my own local area network. They can do any man in the middle attack, anykind theoretical access. And people at ISP are somewhat 100% honest without being pushed without any leverage or ransom? Yeah, sure.... And every cop are honest! The problem here isn't that media watchdog couldn't crack or check the data flow. But that they can not connect specific data pipe to specific person unless it is very so.
Example, if I live at area where there are just these three houses. Lets assume I go now to download material X what is illegal. Media watchdog gets it and informs local company blah blah...
If someone comes to my location, does a simple test that there are no other houses near my connection end so that house visitors or family is the only logical one. If I would live alone in that house, it is even more clear it is me.
If I have encrypted network, then it even lays off any change that someone just came and stop by to do that download and drove away.
If only my computer is having access to that network and no one can have access to it than me physically (locked behind my own office room where only I have key and pin-code for door) then isn't it already 100% correct assumption that I was the one who went and downloaded the "X author Y media from Z album", even if it isn't found from my computer anymore or tracks to it (evidences from wiping computer exists)?
How about a apartment around tens of families, by using a WLAN network without encryption and just with MAC filter?
MAC filtering isn't a encryption. Any teen can crack it in seconds, like you said... It isn't even spotting a hacker or cracker a one second.
So, MAC filtering isn't encryption so it isn't illegal or hard. You can not blame the connection owner if the data isn't found from that computer (wiped clean).
And what if you can have access to computers at that network hard drives because they have sharing enabled? Can you deny that someone couldn't do that they just copy the MAC address and copy files to your computer after they downloaded it?
It isn't hard thing to do at all by teen what just search technic for that one day.
People can share IP addresses, but only twins share DNA?
There is no active mechanic that prevents people from getting exactly the same DNA sequence, it is just very unlikely that it happens.
For DNA tests used in court the test is only unique up to one in a million. This means that from one DNA sample you will get about 300 hits in the US, if you get a match with someone who is involved in the trial or someone who has a criminal record you say that it isn't from one of the other 299.
One of those FAQs is "what if I don't know who was driving", and the answer they give is something along the lines of "you are legally required to tell us who was driving". So there you go, they are stating that if you don't know who was driving you have a legal obligation to commit purgury.
No - the point is that the registered keeper is legally responsible for knowing who was driving. If you don't know who was driving you commit a different offence, but the original speeding offence cannot be charged. To avoid this being used frivolously the penalty is higher than is likely for a speeding offence. It is clear that if you don't know who's driving you should plead guilty to failing to identify the driver and take the fine and penalty points - not to commit purgery.
And there are 35184372088832 /48's available for allocation based on current IPv6 allocation rules. More than enough for everyone to have several.
Actually if you can reasonably show you are unaware of who was driving, you CAN return the NIP (notice of intention to prosecute) with said information.
Maybe, but that is contrary to the information they provide on the NIP.
1) Not receiving the NIP in a timely manner - usually receipt outside of 14 days will be accepted here
Untrue - I received an "intent to prosecute" (or whatever they call the one you get if you don't respond to the NIP) a few years ago. I had never received the NIP, so I challenged them. They resent the NIP and gave me an extension, but they flatly said that this was a good will gesture and that legally they are deemed to have served the NIP if they have proof of posting. If the Royal Mail lose it, tough shit, you're still in the wrong for not having replied to the NIP you never received.
Yes, you can challenge this in court, and you may even win, but can you take the risk? The fixed penalty notice usually gives you the choice of a "training course" (no points) or points, making any kind of legal challenge causes the immediate withdrawal of the offer of a training course, and the courts can (and do) award much stiffer penalties than the fixed penalty notice if you lose.
The way the law applies to the police is, of course, completely out of line with the way it applies to the general public - several years ago I had to serve a legal notice, and I had to employ a process server to ensure it got there - a court would not have accepted just a proof of posting (or even a recorded delivery proof of receipt!)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
People make it always sound like you drop the hair of someone at a crimescene and WHAM, straight to jail.
Nope, but it happens.
No - the point is that the registered keeper is legally responsible for knowing who was driving.
Ok, ignoring the fact that you're citing the Daily Mail of all things as a accurate source of information, it also doesn't say that there is any such legal responsibility. If you are an organisation operating a pool car system or hire car system then I can see this would be standard due dilligence, but for personal users where the car is shared by the family, you can't expect people to keep track of this. This is especially true on long journeys where families often swap driver regularly througout the journey - 14 days later when you get an NIP can you really be expected to know which member of the family was driving at that specific moment in time?
If you don't know who was driving you commit a different offence, but the original speeding offence cannot be charged. To avoid this being used frivolously the penalty is higher than is likely for a speeding offence. It is clear that if you don't know who's driving you should plead guilty to failing to identify the driver and take the fine and penalty points - not to commit purgery.
Yes, the law had a loophole in it that could be exploited by lieing, so they closed it by just penalising everyone, whether they are innocent or guilty - great job!
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Judge Michael Baylson, eh? Something seems..... off.
That's only because the law SAYS it's enough, due process be damned.
Apparently he knows how to trace somebody from their IP address... LOL.
If I remember correctly there are actually two companies that sell almost all DNA testing supplies to crime labs in the US and they pick the genetic markers that are used. So while DNA profiling is not specifically tied to a single set of markers dictated by a private company, that is the practical result.
That probability you speak of is based on the assumption that the DNA markers being used have no correlation. That assumption is not factual. And 99% is nowhere near enough to meet a "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden. That means one in a hundred are false positives. That isn't even good enough to uniquely identify a staff member at many local businesses let alone uniquely identify a suspect for criminal conviction. There are 45 murder cases a day in the US. These days there is at least one DNA sample involved in most of them. At 99% that would mean at least one false positive at least once every couple days.
If the odds aren't good enough for a casino or lottery ticket to pay out a ten million dollar jackpot they are nowhere near good enough to provide the basis for convicting potentially innocent people. It is better to let a hundred guilty guys off than to wrongly imprison a single innocent person.
No - the point is that the registered keeper is legally responsible for knowing who was driving.
Ok, ignoring the fact that you're citing the Daily Mail of all things as a accurate source of information, it also doesn't say that there is any such legal responsibility.
OK, here's another reference: Failing to Identify Driver (Failing to Supply Information)
Yes, the law had a loophole in it that could be exploited by lieing, so they closed it by just penalising everyone, whether they are innocent or guilty - great job!
No they set a legal obligation which you are guilty of if you do not fulfil. It is part of the Highway Code and will be taught to drivers after 1988, and it is an obligation of drivers who have already passed the test to keep up with changes to motoring law.
Does hair clipping contain enough DNA to do a test? I remember hearing that testing on hair is done on the follicle, so hair clipping would not work. OTOH, I recall more recently hearing that hair is better at preserving the small pieces of DNA it contains (no air or water), so ancient DNA is better done on hair samples. But are the pieces in hair large enough to use in a forensic test?
"When comparing to a 100 suspects that are not related (remember the profile will tell us if they are related.) You are more like 99.99999999% sure. Even far more than that. "
Wrong. The reliability of the person doing the testing accurately is not anywhere near 99.99999999% or even 99.999% and represents the absolute maximum assurance the test can provide. That is comparable to saying something weighs 1.34545g when your scale is only accurate to +/- .1g.
The lack of randomness does not make DNA profiling a better indicator, it skews the odds the other way. It proves that there are relationships in these markers. If I have a one byte binary number you can say that there are 2^8 possible numbers so the chances of a randomly picked number matching mine are 2^8. But the moment that number has a meaning the uniqueness of the indicator drops. If it is human readable English text then there are only 96 possibilities and my random selection now has a 1 in 96 possibility of matching. If it was a "random" keypress the odds become much better and a simple number can no longer express the odds because some numbers are more probable than others, for instance if my random key is a home row key the odds are dramatically better than 96 to 1. More like 20 to 1 and even within the home row some keys are more likely than others.
The point being, while we suspect these markers are very unique, there definitely have not been any studies on a sample set nearly large enough to assert a 1 in 99.99999999% probability with any degree of confidence. Those type of odds assume there is no relation between these markers and any relation can drop the real probability by several orders of magnitude.
And as unlikely as it is it already happened. Twice. In one case they got one arrested based on DNA, but later the real offender confessed. Maybe a mass test is in order to see how good the chosen markers are (but I don't know who to entrust that database with). That these improbable cases already appeared showed that you should stick to more conventional police routine and use the tests to remove possible offenders from you list of candidates.
Spoofing another person's DNA would be *slightly* more challenging.
You don't need to spoof. Just select some dandruff boy and collect samples to spread at the scene.
"MAC authentication is absolutely, literally, worthless from a security standpoint if you are using WPA2. Anyone who has the capability to crack WPA2 will necessarily have the ability to impersonate your MAC-- it is, I believe, a requirement to mount an attack against WPA2 in the first place. The fact that you have MAC auth turned on would probably not even be noticed by an attacker, and if it were, it would take all of about 5 seconds to get around."
Absolutely. The only sensible way of securing a WIFI-network seems to be to always place WIFI-users in a "special" network zone with absolutely no access anywhere at all, except to a fully updated, monitored and secured VPN-server. And the only way of accessing anything else is to log in through the VPN-server with a separate per-user login. My former university did this back in 2001 and it seems as valid today as it was back then.
three time's a charm: perjury
You could even use it to commit the crime if you so desired, but you'll need a fair bit of hair to choke a full grown man.
He'd only need to inhale 5ml of saliva to drown, though.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
In parts of the US, if your car is used in a drugs crime, you are responsible. You can go to jail for someone borrowing your car to buy a joint.
Is that right or wrong? It is the law and the law is made by politicians who are elected by the people. And the people are NOT you nor the people on the internet forum you visit.
The people are an unseen group who do all the things that are uncool and out of date and they make up the rules of society, NOT to benefit some teen who thinks he knows how the world should run but to the benefit of them, or so they think.
The war on drugs was introduced by politicians who got re-elected. The war on copyright pretty much the same. Yes, this does show democracy sucks donkey balls for doing the "right" thing. It also shows that what is the "right" thing, no two people can agree upon.
It will be intresting to see how this case goes. From precedent, it could go either way.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Star Wars?
I wouldn't say no way. Perhaps no way after the fact if all of those points weren't logging or something like that. If someone spent enough time they could set things up so that the next time you did something nefarious they had adequate evidence. It would be a lot of work. Think Mitnick.
I was using an IP address to log in users for the prototype game client / server code. To test some latency issues I connected to the City-Wide WIFI network in Corpus Christi, TX. I couldn't log in because a neighbor friend of mine had already joined the server over the City's WIFI connection. Looking at the logs I determined that HALF the City was using a single IP address.
I can't tell if you're more of a fool or a moron... Even worse, you're probably just a know-nothing know-it-all.
You can use it to help you identify the miscreant. Its just not definitive on all cases, everywhere, all the time which is what some companies would like the courts to believe.
DNA changes all the time, it's called mutation, often the change has no effect, other times it just ends up with a dead cell and so the mutation isn't multiplied, when this goes really wrong in other ways one ends up with uncontrolled growth and this we term as cancer, any 2 cells in the same organism may have slightly different DNA. Mutations happen from a variety of reasons, radiation, exposure to certain chemicals (we call these mutagens, they also tend to be carcinogens as mutations can cause cancer), viruses, and just simple errors in the way DNA is replicated during mitosis and meiosis. Cells also have a way to attempt to repair DNA damage though this does not always work.
It seems the solution would be to use reaver or aircrack-ng to demonstrate the concept to the judge. If he doesn't believe, do it to his home router and download away. It won't be your fault. You were not in charge of that ip.
actually, the standard test does not discriminate between siblings.
source: I was privy to a case in the UK where the standard test was employed to attempt to determine paternity; the test could not separate the two men (who were full siblings) who were contending paternity. Rather than go to the expense of an extended test (which would certainly have been able to separate enough markers to determine paternity), the "court" decided to find fact in favour of the Local Authority who had claimed that the brother of the husband was in fact the father, hence the mother was an adultress, hence untrustworthy.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
"Negligent homicide"?
Last time I checked, homicide was a crime.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If you're sharing a connection with your roommates, the police no have reason to go around searching everyone's computers. They need to know which person to search first. They may have an IP address, but until they know who, it's private property. Remember, Copyright is a civil issue and the plaintiff must know whom they're attacking, but they can't violate other's rights to identify.
a trial is "necessary to find the truth." ???
Wouldn't an experiment or a demonstration be more in order?
Or is that what the trial is to consist of?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
That simply proves that Maryland has dispensed with due process.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Tedious compared to "forge packet saying I AM SPARTACUS AT MAC ADDRESS 00:11:22:33:44;55". Arp poisoning really only requires you to shout really, really loudly on the network.
There are 13 standard Loci with something like 10 Alleles or more at each marker. So that is something like the chance of a "random" match as one in 10^-12.
Only if you operate on the assumption that none of those loci are correlated with each other.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
DHCP leases would not either necessarily, and regardless NONE of that is in any way authenticated-- your computer can claim to be whomever it wants at whatever IP and MAC it wants, and as long as the correct info is also out there it will make no difference to its reachibility. The idea that network announced info is forensically reliable is just false.
which includes things like statistical analysis, looking at words and speech patterns, timing delays in the data, other data your computer may accidentally chirp (like windows update, which sends a GUID)
Timing delays of a few microseconds across the internet? Yea, not going to be noticeable, considering the relatively massive delays incurred at your first hop and the high jitter most home connections will have. At best, you can sometimes identify what OS-- and sometimes, what application-- is at the other end of a connection, but thats it. You certainly cannot identify a specific NIC or machine from across a public network and through a NATted device. If you have evidence to the contrary, I (and Im sure a lot of IDS / IPS guys) would be interested to see it.
Since you can't imagine a death threat being sent and then the secret service not showing up ASAP?
Unless they want an immediate mistrial or acquittal caused by failure to apply due process, theyre going to get a warrant first, which doesnt happen on the timescale you seem to think it does. Ive seen a couple of these cases pop up, and the timescale is weeks, not hours. The culprits are caught by keeping evidence on their laptop and leaving stupid traces everywhere for the ISP to log.
Even NAT leaves traces in memory -- All it requires is a single missed ACK during the close of a TCP session, or sending any UDP data, and the state table data may remain there for minutes, hours, even days.
Baloney. There are TCP timeouts in both desktop OSes and routers to prevent resource exhaustion. Its substantially less than "days"; TCP was designed to function in high-loss situations, and would be unusable if the timeouts were set that high.
Many NAT implimentations in firmware have problems with memory leaks caused by faulty code. Guess what's in the leak?
Its not a half-open connection, thats for sure. Closing half-open connections is kind of a basic function of the router. Got a reference to what youre citing? Im aware of memory leaks, but it tends to be in things like "HTTPS web console", not "basic function that even windows consumer editions can handle".
Maybe you missed the memo, but since 9/11, all you need to do is mention the word 'terrorist' and you have no civil rights.
Maybe you missed the memo, but for a while the allegation was that non-citizens captured in a warzone should have constitutional rights. Youre speaking nonsense; just because a citizen becomes fair game in a warzone when aligning themselves with military beligerents, doesnt change law in the US.
Not sure if youre aware, but the rules change slightly in a combat zone.
They're detaining people in Guantanamo and elsewhere in the world without trial or charges being brought against them.
We didnt bring charges against people in WW2 before detaining them as POWs, either. Somehow that never made it back to the US. Youre going to have to get over the fact that things are different when you take up arms and declare yourself an enemy combatant.
I have only ever seen PPPoE used on DSL, and it seems to be moving towards DHCP. Every single non-DSL home connection I have seen has been DHCP.
Plus, Im pretty sure (though my PPPoE experience is limited) that you still get a dynamically assigned public IP even if your router is set to PPPoE.
So what does Starbucks do? Who shares their wifi with everyone? And other businesses? Is Starbucks guilty of anything their customers do on their wifi? And if they are legally allowed to share it, why can't an individual? Different laws for business vs individual? I see no reason why it would be inherently unethical and therefore must be against the law for a person to share his wifi with a stranger. It would also be a tough sell to say that legally you're responsible for anything done on your network, because you're an individual and not a business.
Well yeah, we knew that though. It's funny, yet at the same time saddening, when you actually realize that the overwhelming majority of speed cameras and red light cameras are in the predominantly poorer black areas. When you get into "caucasia" as my friends call it, you don't see them anymore.
I went with the horde of robot ninjas over the telepathic mind control. The upkeep costs are significantly lower...I have a brochure if you want one.
I am John Hurt.
Oh. So you're my neighbor. Thanks!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
In fact, if a person wanted to be really nasty about it, the following would be trivial to do:
1.) I passively monitor your WLAN in the evening.
2.) In the morning you leave for work, taking your laptop with you.
3.) I assign YOUR mac address to my pc and go about my illicit business.
You mean while I'm at work with said laptop with a lot of witnesses and firewall logs proving that I wasn't connected to the house? That would seem to be an even better indication that there was some funny business going on.
Is it an evil brochure ?
morcego
DNA testing is not fine. The tests only test a tiny part of the full string and use simple statistical methods to pad out the rest. This is why they fail when dealing with people from other parts of the world and family members. The tests are limited to sample sections and miss a huge amount of the full picture. It would appear that you're the one watching too much TV crime.
Canadian here. The way our cameras work is that they only issue a fine to the registered owner of the vehicle. It is the owners responsibility since they are the ones registered and paying insurance. If the car was speeding or ran a red light, then the owner consented to allow the driver to use the car, and so is responsible for any infractions while driving. If the owner knows who was driving at the time, then they can try and collect the fee from the person driving (visible in the photo), or they can choose to not let that person use their car in the future. That being said, since it does not prove the owner was driving, it does not affect the owners driving record (ie, no demerits, no effect on future insurance rates, etc..). The owner is allowed to plead that the driver did not have consent, in which case the car was considered stolen and proper police work can be done to determine if the car is in fact stolen, or if the owner is lying. If it was indeed stolen, I believe the owner is not responsible for the fees resulting from infractions.
A better parallel is a phone number.
Somebody made a phone call with a voice distorter and threatened someone.
That phone call came from your house. Should you be arrested and thrown in jail because of that?
Or do they have to prove it was you that made the phone call?
That's a much better analogy, I agree, but even then you have to consider that someone could use your IP address without even being on your property if your wireless isn't secured or is improperly secured.
One could perhaps argue that constitutes negligence, but if that's the case every McDonalds and Starbucks in the country is in trouble.
I dont know anyone who has not used an IP that was not his.
"Just because its the law, does not mean its right." - cited to unknown (anyone know?)
I say this in response to any half-wit that follows/enforces a law without thinking it through (or at least get a "gut" or "common sense" feeling about it).
Another phrase I hate, but would love to throw back in the face of the speaker, is "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." I would haul in (after failing my test of obscure laws and other obvious violations they make on a daily basis) all the politicians, law enforcement, lawyers, judges, etc. that would have the nerve to utter those words and see how they like being on the receiving end.
Sadly, the only time that may ever happen is near the fall of our various government levels in the USA. Hopefully, under a new and improved system, these type have either met their demise or took the cue from former Nazi war criminals (AKA hiding in South America).
I Cater to the Needs of Stupid People. - from a coffee mug Christmas gift
I can't tell if you're more of a fool or a moron...
Fool, obviously, as I'm responding to a lying AC. It was a crappy ISP (given the smell in Chorpus Christi, I'd guess any competent network engineer would move, so I'll assume crappy ISP). You are obviously leaving out the part where it was all behind a NAT box because the ISP was too cheap to get enough IPs for its customers. When you lie by deliberate omission of pertinent facts, it shows that you know you are wrong. In that case, the public IP would trace back to the ISP, uniquely identifying the person responsible for the connection. Same as it going to a home user.
Learn to love Alaska
They are, but Starbucks and McDonald's have more lawyers than the state, so the state wouldn't go after them. Likely the heavy downloaders don't want to contend with the low speeds and crappy coffee at those establishments and stay home.
Learn to love Alaska
As I said, " I do not care too much as my machine is secured (I run linux and the machine has been hardened to stop script kiddies)", so you won't get into the important stuff. If someone uses my network to download porn , so be it
You miss my point. If you are using WPA or even WEP, there is a threshold to breaking past it. That threshold is so much higher than the one for spoofing a MAC, that it gains you no security whatsoever. Anyone who could break the WEP, MUST have the capability to spoof MACs (so he can issue the deauth commands and capture the re-auth traffic).
Its sort of like, you deadbolt your front door, and then use masking tape to secure the door a bit more securely to its frame. Anyone getting thru the deadbolt probably wont notice that you put the masking tape up.
Much better analogy. It is, at least here in the US, in an area with wires off the poles, extremely easy to 'tap' someone's phone line and use it for whatever purpose you want (c'mon, it's 2 clip leads and then dial). My ISP is the phone company, off the same two wires (DSL), it would probably be fairly trivial for them to hook their own DSL modem up to that line. My cable (if I had cable internet) runs down the side of my house in similar fashion, it would be trivial to tap into.
Now, I'll add here that you're practically standing in plain sight of any of my neighbors while doing it, but that doesn't mean its not possible to do, or that you couldn't do it easily under the cover of darkness...
The whole point of these cases is not to go to trial, but rather to get a payout with little expenditure of money. Most of the firms that are pursuing these sorts of cases just ignore ones that have any opposition after they get contact information. Almost every case that actually involves a trial is about fighting to be allowed to easily obtain contact information and send extortion letters.
Bingo. They are simply looking for 'backup' on their proposition that having your IP address gets your name/home-address which then gives them someone to harass/extort for money with threats of court. They don't want to take you to court, they want the court to give them backing for the 'idea' that - using the license plate analogy brought up here - if the 'crime' was committed by a vehicle with your plate# on it, you are guilty...
Mind you, the crime was committed by someone w/ my stolen plate, on a different color/make/model vehicle that doesn't match the DMV info for my plate, and it was an Asian guy and I'm not Asian, and I was home at the time hosting a party with 40 people at my home all of whom can verify I was not committing the crime... but what *they* want is the court to say "the plate# is enough to prove guilt" - which it is NOT. The plate# is enough for suspicion/questioning/investigation, but without further evidence (car make/model matches, I match the description, no solid alibi for the time in question, etc) it is not a firm indication of guilt.
Maybe you missed the memo, but since 9/11, all you need to do is mention the word 'terrorist' and you have no civil rights.
Maybe you missed the memo, but for a while the allegation was that non-citizens captured in a warzone should have constitutional rights. Youre speaking nonsense; just because a citizen becomes fair game in a warzone when aligning themselves with military beligerents, doesnt change law in the US.
Not sure if youre aware, but the rules change slightly in a combat zone.
Maybe you missed the 'memo' the POTUS signed on New Years Eve just 10 months ago, called the "NDAA", which gives them the right to arrest a US citizen *on US soil* (not "in a warzone", unless you consider everywhere in the US a warzone), for disagreeing with the government in some way they don't like (you belligerent you, how dare you criticize the government - what do you think you have 'free speech' or something?), detain them without charges and without trial indefinitely (enjoy Sunny Guantanimo!). War zone, combat zone... your town... what's the difference right?
They're detaining people in Guantanamo and elsewhere in the world without trial or charges being brought against them.
We didnt bring charges against people in WW2 before detaining them as POWs, either. Somehow that never made it back to the US. Youre going to have to get over the fact that things are different when you take up arms and declare yourself an enemy combatant.
Open up google and look up "Japanese Americans 1942", and you'll find out all about what the government can do to over 100,000 law-abiding US citizens, without any "charges" other than the fact of their heritage/birthplace. You're going to have to get over the fact that, whether or not you 'declare yourself an enemy combatant', you have no rights other than the few the government deems you have, until *they* decide you don't, and then say goodbye to your precious 'rights' the second they don't see any advantage to you having them. And it doesn't matter whether you are in a "combat zone" or not. "Terror" is an idea, not a place, so when it comes to a "war on terror" your own home is potentially a "war zone", and you potentially have no rights.
Unfortunately the standard in civil cases is "a preponderance of evidence," not "no reasonable doubt."
Unfortunately, a single IP is not "a preponderance of evidence", it is a single piece of evidence with no other evidence to back it up.
That's like saying "the store down the street reported a man stole a chunk of Swiss Cheese, and ran up the street in this direction - you are sitting on your porch, in the direction he ran, eating a Ham and Swiss sandwich, that has Swiss Cheese on it, therefore you must be guilty." That doesn't fly as a "preponderance" of evidence, without something backing it up. If, on the other hand, they gave a description that matched you, including your clothing, had a security video of you running out of the store, etc... then yes.
Since you can't imagine a death threat being sent and then the secret service not showing up ASAP?
(sorry, Slashdot doesn't have a "quickquote" tag)
I'll remind you that this is not a death threat to the President being discussed. The article is about file sharing.
These two things' time sensitivity are handled quite differently.
Plus, it's just not on-topic so the ultimate point appears to be "look what I know" and not so much "I have loads of information that applies to this situation."
Since you seem to know your stuff (I'm not being facetious; I'm serious), what do you think can be extracted at the time of home invasion for search and seizure of evidence for a file sharing case?
Also, in your experience, is enough time between the actual detection of the file sharing activity and the search accrued, without notification to the suspect, that the retained device storage information might be completely 'wiped clean' (so to speak)?
Given the fact that wi-fi is so predominant these days and the fact that several access points are left unsecured as well as the fact that any particular access point routes to one of a number of IP addresses belonging to the same subscriber, an IP address is not a reliable way of determining who actually downloaded things illegally.
Well, there will be a law introduced in the next two years that makes having an insecure wireless access point a crime (not a misdemeanor). Watch.
Yes Homicide is a crime, but so is negligence leading to a death. However the latter isn't the same as homicide.
gmhowell, do slashdot a favor, and leave. Your posts are a giant waste of time, or trolling. You're a waste of life.