Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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!