Hacker News Reader

You will be happy to hear that some countries got it right.

Here in Germany, authorities treat IP addresses as very weak forms of circumstantial evidence due to the issues you mentioned (CGNAT, compromised devices). Nobody is going to be convicted purely based on an IP address.

You don't have to convict someone to do irreparable damage to their life. See Nigel Lang, the man referred to in the article.

Yes, but getting arrested requires "dringenden Tatverdacht" (strong suspicion) here. An IP address isn't sufficient without any additional evidence.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, exceptions apply)

For future reference, there is no legal requirement that says you need to formally announce you're not a lawyer on internet forums.

It can still be useful to do so thought, as a shorthand for there potentially being nuances or exceptions to the claim you are making of which you are unaware.

> for there potentially being nuances or exceptions to the claim you are making of which you are unaware.

Making a statement just to avoid an edge case is what we hackers like to call "boilerplate". We don't find it useful, and generally prefer to avoid it, both for the writer and the reader.

I think it pretty important. The logic goes like this.

"This person seems really knowledgeable on law" which leads to

"Must be some sort of a lawyer"

They then go on to assume they have gained valid legal knowledge.

Interesting, I have always thought that Germany is very strict about all cyber stuff.

I have heard that even starting torrent program will get you fine to your inbox.

How do they trace it?

Thats totally absurd; are they going to fine you for driving too, because cars are often used for robbery getaways? How about a fine for ftp? You can torrent over browsers too, so a fine for that? A fine for booting up a computer that might torrent illegally?

In fairness, what percentage of torrent uses are not for copyright infringement?

Most Linux distributions provide torrents for disk images.

It doesn't matter: torrents hardly enables it to exists, any more than ftp does; its just the current tool of choice for piracy.

You ban it, and they'll switch to something else, and you'll have done nothing but make things slightly less convenient but with relatively large cost to enforce. Why not just do the job properly and ban general purpose computers, limited to government approved and locked down hardware, os and apps?

Obviously, you can open a torrent client just fine in Germany.

However, there's bunch of companies monitoring popular torrent trackers and since it's all peer-to-peer, they can easily figure out your IP address as soon as you start downloading a torrent they're monitoring (they usually work for a particular distribution company and have a list of files they're interested in). Popcorn Time and similar apps are a common and obvious target.

Once they know your IP address, ISPs are required to disclose your personal data (§ 101 UrhG) and they'll send you a nice letter requesting a payment (Abmahnung). If you do not pay, they might sue you (but probably won't).

If they do sue you, it's on them to prove that it was indeed you who used the IP address at the time, which is - in most cases - an impossible feat.

So, yes, you're highly likely to get in trouble if you torrent in Germany, but you'd probably win of you fight it.

Add that inside a home, the IP is again behind a NAT because the whole family is using the wi-fi. Including people who drop by to visit you, to have a dinner, to watch a game.

One IP per person really doesn't hold.

Or someone in range of your Comcast router is using your xfinitywifi network.

Edit: this is incorrect apparently.

A number one reason to always buy your own equipment, and not pay to rent the shit that Comcast provides.

You can't for AT&T U-Verse. They won't assign an IP address to a 3rd party device. I've been meaning to get some cards and do some raw frame dumps to try to figure out how their Fiber modems work and see if I could get it to assign my own device an IP address. It's on the long list of things to do.

I've read how all you need is put the AT&T router behind your firewall and proxy the 802.1x packets to/from the AT&T device, thus faking out the upstream gateway.

I don't have AT&T so I didn't pay much attention to the details. One possible approach: https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy

xfinity has no affect on your connection at all. It uses its own IP, and the bandwidth used is not included in your allocation.

It has the same affect on you as your neighbor does.

Sure, but it's going through your router, right? So if you were torrenting and someone else jumped on the xfinity wifi and started torrenting, it would affect your ability to use your bandwidth, right?

yea, xfinitywifi affected our jitter test. We called Comcast to disable it & our jitter went down.

As another post said, only jitter (and only minorly).

Bandwidth would be unaffected. Or more exactly, on WiFi (but not Ethernet): as affected as if your close neighbor used that amount (since WiFi itself has limited bandwidth). The connection from the router to the cable modem has lots of headroom, so that would be unaffected, as would wired connections.

Those people don't share your IP address. That traffic is separate from customer traffic and encapsulated into a GRE tunnel back to Comcast.

Ah, I didn't realize that. I've got my own modem + router, I've only ever used my neighbors' xfinitywifi when I ran through my own data cap (that's a useful trick if you've got a data cap).

You can forget convincing a judge, by the way. While there is a razor-slim chance that the judge might understand technical matters and wish to let you present your case, they can't. The prosecution will accuse the defense of attempting to 'bamboozle' the jury with confusing technical details. This is used in DNA evidence cases to prevent lawyers from pointing out that 1 in 100 DNA tests are in error due to lab errors or sample contamination. The ability to present technical information in a courtroom is basically nil in the USA. The standard used is a 'reasonable person' and it is assumed that no reasonable person has the ability to understand technical nuance. If the police say your IP address did something bad... you're just screwed, as far as I can tell.

Why can't you ask your lawyer to subpoena the records from the ISP? If you're innocent the ISP's records should indicate you've never interacted with the servers you're being accused of accessing. Just alleging that something could be wrong isn't enough, reasonable doubt has to have a boundary line somewhere. Now if there are cases where defendants are prevented from admitting exculpatory evidence that would disprove circumstantial evidence, then that's a separate problem (i.e. when prosecutors hide evidence).

> Just alleging that something could be wrong isn't enough, reasonable doubt has to have a boundary line somewhere.

IANAL, but wouldn't a presumption of innocence require the prosecution prove that their evidence is not mistaken?

The jury saw it working on CSI. No paid expert witness is ever going to change their idea of how tech works.

To be clear about [1], he isn't being held because he forgot the password to the device, he's claiming he doesn't have to decrypt the device even with a warrant. If he claimed he forgot the password, the government would have to prove he really knows the password to keep him in jail. But because he is refusing to respond to the order, he has to stay in jail until either he complies or he can prove in court the government doesn't have the right to demand it. Whether the government can compel you to decrypt a device is still a bit of an open question, with conflicting decisions from appeals courts. It's not nearly as cut-and-dry as you would suppose. The fifth amendment says you can't be made to testify against yourself, but you can, for example, be made to provide documents via subpoena that may prove your guilt.

Maybe this guy is trying to set a precedent, but can't he just say he forgot? It's not like the government can prove he remembers the password when if he claims he does not.

> most residential IP addresses are dynamic

In theory perhaps, but in practical terms your mileage may vary widely. I'm not sure about the rest of the USA, but in the Chicago area Comcast appears to have pretty much abandoned rotating dynamically-allocated IPs, and I suspect many other carriers have something similar. On the other hand, experience last year with attempting to whitelist a remote user living in Germany showed that at least one ISP there appears to rotate home IPs every few days.

When someone else has a bigger stick.

A quip. But also, I think, how things like this work.

>* most residential IP addresses are dynamic * more and more carriers are using cgNAT as they exhaust IPv4 addresses

You can ask the ISP. They are supposed to store metadata.

> You can ask the ISP. They are supposed to store metadata.

What you say is true, but prosecutors/investigators have little incentive to jump through another hoop. If they are willing to prosecute someone with just circumstantial evidence of an IP address, they aren't really looking to find the perpetrator, only a fall guy.

There's no way a prosecutor/investigator can correlate an IP address to a person without asking the ISP so I don't see your point.

As an ISP there's no way I can correlate an IP address to a person. I can only correlate it to one or more pieces of equipment.

Which are owned by a person. That's like saying you can only correlate a licence plate to a car, not to the owner of a car. Don't be ridiculous.

It's not ridiculous. Some countries (and States, iirc) require that speeding and red light tickets have to be issued to the driver of the car, so traffic cameras capture both the licence plate and the driver's face.

Similarly, if I torrent pirated media in a Starbucks, should the store be charged?

I expect something like the dmca "safe harbor" if you're a Starbucks.

Yes, but that's only partially the reason, or rather, in some cases.

In my state, that was specifically to cover "well, if you deny driving the vehicle..." situations, where people would say "Oh, it wasn't me, I lent my car to someone/my kids drove/whatever", and law enforcement replying "Who?" "Oh, I don't know. Sorry."

Now it's to increase the burden of proof. It's reasonable to assume that if you own a vehicle, you were driving it. It's furthermore reasonable to assume that you should be able to identify who was driving the vehicle, from the face, even if you do have multiple people driving.

If you then refuse to identify the person, or "I don't know", then it's tantamount (in the law's eyes) to saying you weren't taking due regard to the care of operation of your vehicle (after all, if you don't even know their name, how do you know they're licensed?).

The assumption that the owner of a piece of equipment (be it cars or computers)know is always responsible for how it is used is not valid. Cars are stolen with significant frequency, for example. People also drive them without permission (e.g. a spouse gives the keys to a visiting in-law). There are plenty of situations where somebody may not be able to identify who was using the car.

Computer crimes are the same way. It may be possible to prove what equipment it's implicated in a crime, but that's rarely sufficient to make any individual responsible without other evidence. People give WiFi passwords to their guests, equipment is hacked, etc. Establishing that an owner of a router or computer is responsible for anything it is used for unless proven otherwise opens a massive attack surface for blackmail, extortion, etc.

Of course.

> Cars are stolen with significant frequency, for example.

Presumably you'd report your car stolen, no?

> People also drive them without permission (e.g. a spouse gives the keys to a visiting in-law).

Then you'll be able to identify the person via a picture of their face, most likely, no?

> Establishing that an owner of a router or computer is responsible for anything it is used for unless proven otherwise

I'm not trying to say any different, in fact I'm saying that it is a "reasonable" assumption, and as with any reasonable assumption there are notable exceptions, by which showing the driver's face is a reasonable method by which saying "No, Your Honor, the person driving my vehicle is not me". In some states you may not even be obliged to identify the driver, only show that it "is not you".

To tie a request made over CGNAT to the ISP's customer you need both the IP address and the port number of the connection. In my experience, most software that logs IP addresses doesn't bother to log the port number. (Probably because it wasn't relevant before CGNAT came along.)

In that case the ISP would not be able to map the address to a customer, so no one would be getting wrongfully arrested.