After botched child porn raid, judge sees the light on IP addresses
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Really? My takeaway is: allow open access to anyone, but limit the bandwidth. This way nothing can be proven about my actions. (could be anyone) It actually reduces the risk for me if IP is not identifying people anymore.
The main reason I haven't is that there is a 100% chance I'd forget to deactivate it and fry my own hardware. Probably within a week of installing the magnet.
edit: the comment has its place, but I can only assume that an alert at the beginning would be highly appreciated by many.
Serious question.
I'd argue the statute of limitations on spoiling should be the same as murder. Not to suggest its quite as serious
Likewise, Bruce Willis was dead the entire time; Vader is Luke's father; and Rosebud was his sled.
I just think it would have been a nice gesture... 7 letters, not that much of an effort. Of course, it's not a crime, I wouldn't deem anyone a douche because they forgot to forewarn in the heat of discussion.
They should do a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode on this one :P
Nobody would know how that is applicable until they actually get right to that part, anyway.
It's not like "Dumbledore dies."
1) computer equipment pretty inexpensive (the more costly stuff is at the end of its life cycle anyway).
2) Important Data is backed up to the cloud
3) I am completely innocent of any Child Porn issues, and only minor issues with copyright (I do enjoy some fan sub anime).
4) Totally willing to sue for damages.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's such a thing as "minor issues with copyright" in the current code.
Well, unless something incredibly hairy goes down. But I'm reasonably certain arrests for child pornography don't go down like raids on hostile gang hideouts...
Possible explanation for your post: you are a cop apologist who doesn't know what he is talking about.
Furthermore, you shouldn't let the thugs rule you. Talk about exactly how you feel in as public a forum as possible.
Was not disappointed.
This is the correct result. I hope it is more broadly adopted by the courts. At the moment these seem primarily driven by legal firms using extortion as a business model, we should shut that down first and then go back to working through the issues of fair use and copyright.
The problem here is that the mass-infringement actions have twisted this otherwise legitimate process into something warped and grossly unfair by using the name-gathering process to target people who are then told, "pay up or you will be exposed as a downloader of porn" (or, in other cases, you will be subjected to a major infringement lawsuit that is not worth defending).
Federal judges have enormous power and this judge (and many others) have simply said, "I won't let my court be used as an instrument for a shakedown," using legal niceties about jurisdiction to justify the matter formally. In effect, they are tossing the mass-infringement lawyers out the door, telling them their model won't work in their court. This is indeed the right outcome for this sort of abuse.
All these situations are so-called risk-liabilities. How else would we solve situations like this?
I was not saying that the dog did anything consciously. The point is that there is a class of liabilities that do no depend on being 'factually responsible' for something. You can have no power whatsoever to prevent something, and still be liable for it. That makes the case for this wireless network even stronger - there is something you can do as an owner. You can take reasonable measures to stop others from using it. It makes perfect sense to hold people responsible for enabling the improper use by others.
(note also that I'm not claiming that somebody who has an open access point will be jailed for child pornography; what I'm saying is that there is a very reasonable case to be made for holding people accountable for not taking proper care of their property (wifi network) that will enable others to use it illicitly).
If you use someones paper, pen, envelope and stamp to threaten someone, you're still liable.
If you tap someones electricity, you're liable.
Besides, it's not a 'customer' (so there's no ISP<->user relation) if the owner of the AP doesn't even know the user, or even that the user exists.
Edit: USA, btw
In case of the dog and the tile, it was the things themselves that caused the damage, unguided by a human. In case of the car, the law is there for convenience purposes: they can only trace it to you and to be able to fine speeding, it cannot be otherwise. Those seem like the usual cases, but they are actually special cases. The usual case is you lending a book, a glass of water, a gun. If someone uses the knowledge, the water or the gun to cause harm, they are liable.
With ubiquitous free wifi, your AP is not instrumental in the perpetration of a crime. The criminal could easily have gone elsewhere; that makes you a non-accessory. Of course, IANAL. But see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_(legal_term). I do not see how providing internet access could possibly make you an accessory to a crime.
DD-WRT and other open source firmware should be a little more secure in this regard. The open source firmware out there is definitely more reliable over long periods of time than the stock firmware that comes on most routers, so I assume it's also more secure.
sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:12:34:56:78:9A
MAC spoofing would only be relevant if you were regularly using random spoofed MACs on your own network.
Or, if for some reason that practice was widespread enough that it provided plausible deniability.
The case at hand is a civil case, where the option of a search warrant is not available. If it were a child porn case, the police would still be able to get a warrant to search the house where the IP address is assigned.
I hope is that as time goes on, the legal system (and hopefully all parts of the government) better learn how technologies work and don't work so they can make more informed decisions. Hopefully, as the younger generation start their careers in those fields, they bring better understanding of technologies with them. Though there is another article I read today that is an anecdotal story about someone my age that doesn't know difference between a web browser and search engine.
After writing all this, it reminded me of a friend. He is now an IT manager and his wife is a lawyer (currently a judge's assistant I think). They were talking a couple years ago about the lack of credible expert witnesses in the IT field. She had seen that they are not staying current in the IT field, similarly what can happen with conference speakers. They spend all their time talking about technologies while not having the time to gain a deep knowledge of new technologies.
I seem to taken a tangent towards the end (or maybe the beginning), but oh well.
dhcp gives addresses to the computers connected to the wifi. but those addresses are only used on the "user" side of the router. packets going out from the router to the internet do not contain those addresses (nor do they contain each user's mac address).
as far as the rest of the internet goes, there's a single address, with multiple ports, which is your router. the nat (network address translation) in your router maps from the port used to the local mac/ip (dhcp) address. so someone "outside" does not know, without additional information, which user of the wifi is making a particular connection. hence this story.