It occurs to me that the easy solution to router-history checking, regardless of the technological options, is to
just replace the router every year. Sell the old one on Craigslist and inflict one's troublesome history on some unsuspecting person; potentially, buy a used one and brush off any claims of old piracy with "that's not my history at all."
Dedicated serious pirates might replace their routers twice a year, or quarterly. Or rotate them between a pool of friends. I recommend starting a rumour that routers suffer from "bit fatigue" from travelling the same paths all the time, and the software functions more efficiently if exposed to different hardware and operating systems, to encourage router-trading amongst random elements in the populace. Quick, someone design a funny graphic and release it on tumblr.
More things pirates could do to make router checking less useful for anti-piracy lawsuits:
- Suggest to college students that router-trading is romantic because it shares your history with your beloved.
- Suggest that swapping around all the routers in the dorms is a terrific prank.
- Ask to borrow routers from people going on vacation (tell 'em that yours is "getting full"); offer to lend yours when you're out of town for the weekend.
- Announce that each CPU type has a specific router that's best for it--and since the mfr's won't tell you which one that is, the only way to find out is by experimentation. Suggest that everyone swap routers around for a few months until they've figured out which one works best. Encourage this even among people using the same brand; tell them it'll sort out the different firmware versions.
- Encourage small businesses to upgrade routers often and donate the old ones to local schools. Encourage schools to send routers home with kids as upgrades to theirs.
It doesn't matter how ridiculous some (all) of these things are; what matters is that, if any of them catch on, the ability to reliably use router activity in a courtroom as proof of *anything* is gone.