US ruling makes server RAM a 'document'?

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Dalar
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US ruling makes server RAM a 'document'?

Postby Dalar » Fri Jun 15, 2007 4:58 pm

It will be fixed in Toril 2.0.
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Postby Vaprak » Fri Jun 15, 2007 10:46 pm

Simple case of yet another judge or government official not having any clue at all about technology. None.
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Postby moritheil » Tue Jun 19, 2007 5:07 pm

It might not be tech-specific. Remember that not all judges are grounded in reality.
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Postby teflor the ranger » Fri Jun 22, 2007 5:48 am

Dalar wrote:http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/US-ruling-makes-server-RAM-a-document-/0,130061733,339278641,00.htm

Thoughts Teflor?


This is a critical ruling. It can protect a computer's RAM as evidence, thus allowing the contents to be confiscated unaltered.

Imagine if a computer were simply ordered to be seized. A person could simply pull the plug on a computer and what data would have been available in the RAM would be simply lost - which wouldn't have technically been illegal before this ruling.

Especially in the cases where data critical to a case were stored only in memory and never on the hard disk.

The contents of RAM are a tangible document, much like a piece of paper. It stores information, after all, just as any other document does. I mean, if you've got a window of word open and are typing an actual document up, where do you think the computer has that data :P

Hell, there's a reason why we use terms like "page cache" and "page frame" when we're talking about memory management. :P
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Postby Sarvis » Fri Jun 22, 2007 12:03 pm

You're missing one big thing: RAM storage is impermanent. You don't even need to turn off the computer to lose the data from your word document, just close Word and the RAM's data is lost to be reused by something else.

So now shall it be illegal to turn your computer off, or even close any programs you had open just to satisfy the justice department? It's retarded. I mean hell, this post will be gone from my RAM a few seconds after I click submit...
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Postby teflor the ranger » Fri Jun 22, 2007 10:04 pm

Sarvis wrote:You're missing one big thing: RAM storage is impermanent. You don't even need to turn off the computer to lose the data from your word document, just close Word and the RAM's data is lost to be reused by something else.

So now shall it be illegal to turn your computer off, or even close any programs you had open just to satisfy the justice department? It's retarded. I mean hell, this post will be gone from my RAM a few seconds after I click submit...


It's an excellent tool for justice. Search and seizure has always been an invasive practice - seeing as how they are confiscating your stuff.

If you're ever fully searched under warrant, your ram will be the least of your concerns...

While of course, ram is impermanent, so is paper. Protecting a paper as evidence means you can't shred it. If your ram is being seized, don't touch your computer :P Easy cheesy advice from a non-lawyer.

Also, remember, that there is such a thing as 'reasonable action.' The government's not going to jail you if they come up with a search warrant and lightning strikes your house.


I suspect the way they are going to use this will be to develop software tools that will make a computer's memory dump into a thumb drive or other memory device, to be analyzed by technicians later. Or by installing software that will log and track your memory.

So, it is a helpful tool for justice. You may not like it, but the courts seem to.
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Postby Sarvis » Fri Jun 22, 2007 10:20 pm

teflor the ranger wrote:It's an excellent tool for justice. Search and seizure has always been an invasive practice - seeing as how they are confiscating your stuff.


I don't care about the invasiveness of it. I care about the technical stupidity of it.

If you're ever fully searched under warrant, your ram will be the least of your concerns...


Exactly. They aren't going to find kiddie pron in a perverts RAM, they'll find it on his hard drive or other permanent storage. They'd only find it in his ram if were actively looking at it the exact moment they kicked his door in, and even then it could be swapped to disk before the cops get to the PC.

While of course, ram is impermanent, so is paper. Protecting a paper as evidence means you can't shred it. If your ram is being seized, don't touch your computer :P Easy cheesy advice from a non-lawyer.


You have to actively destroy paper, you do not have to actively destroy ram. Hell, ANY storage is impermanent if you count willful destruction!

RAM could be swapped to the pagefile on disk without the user doing anything though, which means the RAM is empty of evidence and it is instead on the hard drive again.


I suspect the way they are going to use this will be to develop software tools that will make a computer's memory dump into a thumb drive or other memory device, to be analyzed by technicians later. Or by installing software that will log and track your memory.


That's just it. Dumping to a thumb drive only gives you what the guy was running/looking at the moment they do the dump. Logging memory? It changes up to millions of times per second! Enough storage wouldn't EXIST to store a couple days worth of RAM logging.


So, it is a helpful tool for justice. You may not like it, but the courts seem to.


It's not a matter of like or dislike, it's a matter of them having no understanding of how this shit works. The hard drive and server/network logs should be plenty of information to convict anyone of anything they actually did. Nothing will have gotten into RAM without coming from one of those anyway!
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Postby Lathander » Sat Jun 23, 2007 2:21 am

I can not believe there is something I agree with Sarvis about...

Saying that the contents have RAM have to be saved as a document similar to how email is saved is loony. All this does is give storage companies more chances to sell storage space and tool to save this data. In addition, it creates regulation which is extremely difficult to actually follow. By not following this regulaion, the company would be guilty because they did not keep it.

This is a good example of bad cases making bad law.
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Postby teflor the ranger » Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:17 am

Sarvis wrote:I don't care about the invasiveness of it. I care about the technical stupidity of it.


Excuse me, but what technical stupidity? Data can be easily retrieved from RAM. Computers do this all the time. You could even say that ... that is a primary function of what a computer is... made for?

In fact, every time you hit the sleep button, you could say that.... your computer is doing....

exactly that.

As for your idea that people will have to log all the changes in their ram, that's ridiculous. I understand it was mentioned in the article, but nothing in the judge's actual ruling is going to require anyone to log all of the changes in their computer's RAM.
Last edited by teflor the ranger on Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby teflor the ranger » Sat Jun 23, 2007 6:22 am

Lathander wrote:Saying that the contents have RAM have to be saved as a document similar to how email is saved is loony.


It isn't saying that. All the ruling is stating is that data in the computer's RAM is within the defendant's control and custody - meaning that ultimately, the owner of the computer can control what happens to the data - and if a web site operator is asked for user data, they should be able to at least start producing it from that point on.


I'm going to go ahead and post some of the ruling in case you didn't bother to say... read it.

(5) defendants must preserve the pertinent data within their posession, custody, or control and produce any such data in a manner which masks the Internet Protocal addresses ("IP addresses") of the computers used by those accessing defendant's website;

I'm going to go ahead and say the logging of such data on web servers is already done at present time.

(4) defendants have failed to demonstrate that the preservation and production of such data is unduly burdensome, or that the other reasons they articulate justify the ongoing failure to perserve and produce such data

So when you run a website, and you're asked to track what users are doing, not only did the defendant NOT come up with such logs, they did not start doing it.
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Postby Lathander » Sat Jun 23, 2007 7:38 pm

My understanding is that this is for torrentspy, right? IP logging can easily be done at the IP level. The real question is the expansion from "they visited" to "what they did on the site". That is a huge amount of data to keep track of every click a person made on a site. Also, and lawyers help me out here, calling RAM contents a document means you have to keep those contents in case they are used in a future court case. A good example would be someone writing a response to a client and going back and editing that response letter for things they took out. That was in RAM at one time, but taken out of the document. That should not be forced to be saved.

Quite honestly, you quoted the least important sections to the broader public. 2, 3 and 6 are the most important. 6 probably being the most as it says there was formerly no precedent for saving RAM. By creating this ruling, this judge is creating a precedent.
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Postby teflor the ranger » Sun Jun 24, 2007 4:48 am

Lathander wrote:My understanding is that this is for torrentspy, right? IP logging can easily be done at the IP level. The real question is the expansion from "they visited" to "what they did on the site". That is a huge amount of data to keep track of every click a person made on a site.


It is a fair amount of data, but insignificant. Most websites already track this data. Don't forget that a few gigabytes here and there will hold more data than all the text in your local library. Or libraries... or all the libraries in your state.........

Lathander wrote:Also, and lawyers help me out here, calling RAM contents a document means you have to keep those contents in case they are used in a future court case.


Put it on a CD-R? Furthermore, the justice system wouldn't ask people to do something that requires more techincal competence than a reasonable person in that particular situation would have.

Lathander wrote:A good example would be someone writing a response to a client and going back and editing that response letter for things they took out. That was in RAM at one time, but taken out of the document. That should not be forced to be saved.


Yes it should. Replace RAM with PAPER and you can see why your argument here doesn't apply. You see, if the data is in your custody and control, and a government body legally tells you not to touch it - don't touch it.

Lathander wrote:Quite honestly, you quoted the least important sections to the broader public. 2, 3 and 6 are the most important. 6 probably being the most as it says there was formerly no precedent for saving RAM. By creating this ruling, this judge is creating a precedent.


No, I didn't. That was what the news article was talking about. Sections 4 and 5 are what the precedent is - and the part you probably didn't read before.

The news article already stated everything that you could find in sections 2, 3, and 6 - why would I re-print that? The important thing is that you've read the ruling now.

There obviously needs to be precedents set when it comes to electronic data as evidence. Data in your computer's RAM _IS_ under the owner's custody and control should be subject to rules of tampering and evidence. Are there places in your RAM that you have no control over? Yes. Your operating system, for instance - there will be precedence built for this in our robust legal system as well.

However, choosing to throw away all of the data the government asks you to keep as a part of a legal investigation?

Clearly wrong. Undefensible. RAM is temporary memory shouldn't be an excuse - because it would have been easy to retain the evidence requested.
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Postby Lathander » Sun Jun 24, 2007 4:23 pm

Paper is a poor example. If I write something on paper, but I don't send it to the client, I can toss it into the shredder. We have lots of big bins for shredding. RAM is the same thing as the paper that eventually goes into the shredder. It is temporary.
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Postby teflor the ranger » Thu Jun 28, 2007 4:31 pm

Lathander wrote:Paper is a poor example. If I write something on paper, but I don't send it to the client, I can toss it into the shredder. We have lots of big bins for shredding. RAM is the same thing as the paper that eventually goes into the shredder. It is temporary.


And that is the whole point I was making. RAM can be a document every bit as well as paper can.
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Postby Sarvis » Thu Jun 28, 2007 6:01 pm

teflor the ranger wrote:
Lathander wrote:Paper is a poor example. If I write something on paper, but I don't send it to the client, I can toss it into the shredder. We have lots of big bins for shredding. RAM is the same thing as the paper that eventually goes into the shredder. It is temporary.


And that is the whole point I was making. RAM can be a document every bit as well as paper can.


Except that there is no way to read the data in RAM without transferring it to another medium.

Honestly, a good analog to RAM would be a typewriter ribbon. Sure, the data you just typed is there for a few seconds... but only until you hit the next keystroke on that spot of the ribbon, then that data is gone.

I got about 3/4 of the way through the ruling, and I see waht they were trying to say... but they were dancing around an issue with not being able to force someone to "create" a document. In order to do this they introduced the term Server Log, and the term RAM and as the ruling went on started using them more and more interchangeably.

The problem is that they are not interchangeable. The server log is data written to a file on disk when a request is made generating an ordered list of requests <i>translated into human readable text</i>, the RAM stores the actual requests but not within a list and they are not in human readable text.

They are making the RAM a document because they cannot force the defendant to create server logs... even though they would be required to create a document to actually read any of the data in RAM, or even just avoid losing it!
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