Ruling: IP address does not identify person

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by wizwor

I disagree. Speeders and people running red lights kill innocent bystanders. Where I'm from, life is worth more than a couple thousand dollars of lost potential revenue.

I don't disagree at all. My point makes more sense when viewed from the angle of what the quantum of punishment is. If you're fining one guy 50$ for speeding, and another guy 300,000$ for using a torrent, you'd expect them to have a stronger case against the guy being fined higher.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

I don't disagree at all. My point makes more sense when viewed from the angle of what the quantum of punishment is. If you're fining one guy 50$ for speeding, and another guy 300,000$ for using a torrent, you'd expect them to have a stronger case against the guy being fined higher.

The theory is, speeding puts all of society at risk, which is why it's a crime, punished by the state. Penalties are small for low-damage crimes (which speeding is, if there's no accompanying damage).

Copyright infringement is a tort, a civil infraction--to go to court, the rights holder has to complain about damages. Nobody else can go to court for him (just like contract violations--if the parties involved are content with how things are working out, they're not obligated to take each other to court, and nobody else can make them). Because of the greater hassle of getting to court at all, and the lack of resources for prosecuting (individuals don't have a whole police force to help with their investigating) civil violations tend to have higher penalties than criminal ones with similar types of damage.

Switching some types IP laws from civil to criminal might be reasonable--if they simultaneously lowered the penalties to match the actual harm to society.

[keeska]

I can go into any router anywhere anytime and pull every website visited, providing that it is not five years ago and the logs have gone past the allocated size, but I guarantee that I can pull at least 3 to 4 years worth of logs.

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Do you have any?

As anyone who has written code for routers or supports consumer routers knows the original claim is not true. Oftens logs are not even created on consumer routers and if they are the logs are circular so older entries will get over-written by newer entries. How quickly older entries get over-written depends on the amount of space for the log file and how much information the router has to write to the log file. In practice a log usually has only entries less then 3 months old. The flash space to hold large log files would be cost prohibitive for a consumer router.

Just about all commercial and enterprise routers log off of the router itself and for various legals reasons save older logs. For various legal reasons logs are often deleted after 6 months. Although the recording and motion picture industries and some governments are trying to force longer retention of logs.

[hrosvit]

Originally Posted by keeska

As anyone who has written code for routers or supports consumer routers knows the original claim is not true. Oftens logs are not even created on consumer routers and if they are the logs are circular so older entries will get over-written by newer entries. How quickly older entries get over-written depends on the amount of space for the log file and how much information the router has to write to the log file. In practice a log usually has only entries less then 3 months old. The flash space to hold large log files would be cost prohibitive for a consumer router.

Just about all commercial and enterprise routers log off of the router itself and for various legals reasons save older logs. For various legal reasons logs are often deleted after 6 months. Although the recording and motion picture industries and some governments are trying to force longer retention of logs.

You'll notice he has not been back to offer further support of his original claim.

[morantis]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Do you have any?

Of course, tell me what you need for evidence, it's not like I would say something without having done it around 30-100 times over the past ten years.

Right after posting this I hit my router, it is nothing special, just my router for the back of the house, I pulled the log and went back to the oldest entry and here it is...

xx.xx.xx.xx to 192.168.1.7:xxxxxx Friday, June 13,2008 10:44:19

That is the oldest it can go, I do believe that is when I purchased that router, although it is a little hard to remember.

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by hrosvit

You'll notice he has not been back to offer further support of his original claim.

I'm not him and I don't program or support routers, but my MI424-WR router has consumer editable settings to limit log size or turn off logging altogether. Does this surprise you?

[Rob Lister]

Originally Posted by morantis

Of course, tell me what you need for evidence, it's not like I would say something without having done it around 30-100 times over the past ten years.

Right after posting this I hit my router, it is nothing special, just my router for the back of the house, I pulled the log and went back to the oldest entry and here it is...

xx.xx.xx.xx to 192.168.1.7:xxxxxx Friday, June 13,2008 10:44:19

That is the oldest it can go, I do believe that is when I purchased that router, although it is a little hard to remember.

Keeping in mind that logging was turned off, and you claimed that didn't matter, the extraordinary evidence may be for you to expound on the bolded bit. What router command did you use to pull the log?

[plib]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

Keeping in mind that logging was turned off, and you claimed that didn't matter, the extraordinary evidence may be for you to expound on the bolded bit. What router command did you use to pull the log?

Given that the default log location on most consumer routers is /tmp/var/log, which is a ramdisk recreated on boot, which RAM also has to hold all the variables, connection tables, DNSMasq and other configuration files in operation and that my logs for the last six months amount to over a 100MB of files logged to an attached USB stick, and that most consumer routers don't have more than 64MB RAM - I'd like to know that command also.

[hrosvit]

Originally Posted by wizwor

I'm not him and I don't program or support routers, but my MI424-WR router has consumer editable settings to limit log size or turn off logging altogether. Does this surprise you?

Does it surprise me that you can turn off logging? No. Does it surprise you that some routers have no capabilities for providing historical logs of previously attached devices, only a DHCP client list of currently attached devices?

Maybe we are misunderstanding each other. I, along with others, asked for proof that he could obtain five years worth of historical data from "any router anywhere anytime". I do not dispute that some routers contain fantastic logs. I am fully aware that some routers will maintain these logs, and even email them to the administrator when the log reaches a specified size, or at specified time intervals. Some routers have fantastic capabilites. But I am also aware that some cheaper routers have almost no logging capabilities. I would like to see someone pull five years of logs from a $20 router from Walmart.

The part of his claim I asked for proof of was the "ANY router" part.

[ApK]

I don't know about the 5 year claim (I mean, I guess you could only use the router once in 5 years....) or any broad assurance of scope, but it is certainly true that routing tables are not the same as logs, and a forensic analysis of even a cheap consumer router will reveal data that the router MUST have internally in order to function, regardless of logging, including info about NAT/PAT mappings and which internal private IP got or sent which request from which external IP.

It's even possible (though I don't recall the protocol specifics---"loose-source routing" perhaps?) that your private IP is included along with the packet data and may be logged by other systems on the Internet.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by ApK

... but it is certainly true that routing tables are not the same as logs, and a forensic analysis of even a cheap consumer router will reveal data that the router MUST have internally in order to function, regardless of logging, including info about NAT/PAT mappings and which internal private IP got or sent which request from which external IP.

Must? well, I do not know ...

If a brand new router (with no data to begin with) can function perfectly, why would it need 5 years worth of traffic data to function 5 years later?

[ApK]

Originally Posted by kacir

Must? well, I do not know ...

If a brand new router (with no data to begin with) can function perfectly

Yeah, and it'll have a completely accurate record of every request and address mapping: none.


I'm not addressing the 5 year claim, just making the point that there is indeed information in a router that can be used to get information about the whole path (or, 'route') of traffic independent of any management logging function.

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by ApK

Yeah, and it'll have a completely accurate record of every request and address mapping: none.


I'm not addressing the 5 year claim, just making the point that there is indeed information in a router that can be used to get information about the whole path (or, 'route') of traffic independent of any management logging function.

Which is all transient, and thus stored in volatile memory.

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by hrosvit

Maybe we are misunderstanding each other. I, along with others, asked for proof that he could obtain five years worth of historical data from "any router anywhere anytime".

I completely misunderstood. I agree with you.

[morantis]

Originally Posted by Rob Lister

Keeping in mind that logging was turned off, and you claimed that didn't matter, the extraordinary evidence may be for you to expound on the bolded bit. What router command did you use to pull the log?

I didn't use a router command, lol, wow, really? I used the debugger port for my router through SSH, and to the other gentleman that has that huge file as a log, something is very wrong there. I just peeked at our web server log, which maintained about the same line formatting and is still maintaining a full log for Apache at 7 years and it is right around 87 KB, just like any other file of that type. Our client list, which is 540,000 email addresses and names(a little shorter than a log line) is only 37 KB.