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Comment by andrewstuart2 | Hacker News Reader

That, and you should know that there is almost certainly history of who had which IP address when; it's not going to be the same DHCP server running on your small router.

If you download something, get a new IP, and the ISP gets a complaint for your old IP, they have that data and may be obligated legally to do something about it.

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In the long long ago I worked at a small regional ISP. We offered dial-up and dsl. Users were assigned whatever IP was available when they connected, and this was logged (including disconnect time).

So, it was very easy to search the logs and see who was using an IP at a given time in the past (assuming we still had the logs).

I would pay extra for an ISP who only kept those logs say 1 hour.

1 hour should be plenty to identify who is currently running some network attack, and arguably an ISP doesn't have a legit reason for keeping private data longer than necessary to be an ISP under the GDPR .

That would require you to have a choice of ISPs...

I wonder if there are any government requirements here for people operating ISPs. Does anyone have any insight into the time range that is required to keep these logs (if there is one)?

In France it's one year.

Yes there is, at least in EU, not sure for how long do they have to keep the logs.

EU: According to a directive passed 2006, a minimum of six months and at most 24 months. But that directive was ruled invalid and anulled in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

Earlier this year there was a case where someone was accessing illegal stuff (as in, the sort of stuff that does warrant police kicking their door down at 4am) using public WiFi.

Except the ISP had forgotten to take into account daylight savings time and given the police the wrong customer's details. Oops.

ouch

More proof dates aren't easy.

they would be if everyone would just use UTC

Let's go a step further and use TAI to avoid leap seconds while we're at it.

The orthodoxy is that the two most common forms of time stamps are:

(1) Unambiguous: a time in the past that is represented by the number of seconds since the epoch, Jan 1 1970. When coupled with a location/jurisdiction, they can be converted into a wall-clock time like “1:23pm 04 May 2006 Europe/Paris.”

(2) Ambiguous (but semantically meaningful): a time in the future that would be shown on a clock at the location of the event.

The logging of IP addresses would use the former.

The upcoming trial date for illegal torrenting would use the latter.

So who found out the DST issue in the end?

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