Judge Orders TorrentSpy to Turn Over RAM

virgil_disgr4ce writes "In an impressive example of the gap of understanding between legal officials and technology, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian 'found that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.' ZDNet, among others, reports on the ruling and its potential for invasion of privacy."

What's the problem?

[jonbryce]

Take the chips out of the machine and send them to the other side.

What's next?

[raeb]

"Please sir, hand over your motherdisk."

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[RingDev]

You are correct, so the only viable solution is to remove the RAM with out turning off the machine!

-Rick

PS: KIDDING!!!

Re:What's the problem?

[no_pets]

Take the chips out of the machine and send them to the other side.

No shit. That is exactly what I would do.

hmm..

[JustNiz]

I wonder if its floppy or hard ram?

Seinfeld?

[eharvill]

Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George wants to keep his high score in a Frogger arcade machine and rigs up a car battery so he can unplug it and move it elsewhere.

Re:Blank RAM

[zCyl]

Apparently "Your honor, you seem to be an idiot," is not an effective objection.

Sure

[Nom du Keyboard]

Sure, I'll unplug it and send it to you right away, your Honor!

Re:Forgive My Ignorance, But...

[Anonymous Coward]

the only viable solution is to remove the RAM with out turning off the machine...

Wouldn't that void the warranty?

Re:What's next?

[Opportunist]

I insist that you hand over your ISDN drive. And your SCSI modem.

Even if they had the information off the ram...

[CaptainPatent]

Even if they had the information off the ram, there's no way to tell what context they're running the information in.

1001011010100100 - Well with this information I have no choice but to rule the defendant innocent... oh wait...
1001011010100101!! That changes everything! - I have no choice but to rule the defendant guilty !

Network cables are next

[Anonymous Coward]

Next up will the the data on the network cables traveling over the internet tubes

Re:invasion of privacy

[laughing rabbit]

Damn! I knew we should have stopped referring to 'pages' of memory.

Re:What's next?

[heinousjay]

Complaining about a common term promoted by the purveyors of the equipment is geekery at its best. I salute you sir, truly your pedantic nature must make you a hit at parties.

Re:What's the problem?

[cyphercell]

So, lick the contacts before mailing right?

Re:What's next?

[k1980pc]

I think he should have targeted those tubes which carry the data. Turn in all the ethernet cables.

Re:What's the problem?

[sammy baby]

That oughtta work. I do that recreationally anyway.

Re:Judges shouldn't be allowed on these cases.

[mypalmike]

he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle

Moo.

principles

[Anonymous Coward]

if he still couldn't understand this udderly basic principle, how is he going to be competent with the remainder of the case?

Maybe the litigants cud moove for dismissal then milk it for publicity, but I suppose the cow-ards are graduates of Bovine University.

Re:principles

[dr_dank]

I have a beef with the AC, mod down his bull.

Re:hmm..

[Coraon]

Depends, is there cute girl ram around?

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[trolltalk.com]

When I was a kid, RAM was made of flip-flops and I had to go to school with three feet of snow, and it was uphill both ways. Oh boy.

You were lucky - you had a supply of cheap beach sandals! We had to make our bits out of acorns. Our computers would crash every fall when the squirrels would bury all our RAM.

Re:invasion of privacy

[Stewie241]

don't hard drives have cache memory? Better record that too, just to be safe!

Re:What's the problem?

[Dancindan84]

I can already see it coming.

Judge, "The RAM you sent was erased! You're being held in contempt of court! Bailiff, take them away."

Re:What's the problem?

[flitty]

I hereby order you to bring in your computer monitor, to see if we can recall any images that appeared in it, and get IP addresses that way!

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[ScriptedReplay]

Why sonny, count yer blessings. Them acorn-based computers crashed only once a year. We didn't have no acorns so we had to make do with bundles of straw - upright was 1 and tumbled was 0. And the memory bus was rock-based - we threw rocks to flip them bits, and let me tell ya, it was SLOW to flip 'em back to 1. Then rain would get the straw all soggy and zero 'em bits so we'd have to hack'em open and spred 'em in the sun to dry. And we'd have to rebuild them computers daily anyway, 'cause in the morning sheep would pass through the field and the blasted rams would eat at the memory.

I'd still use one even now, for ol'times' sake, 'cause my lawn gets so little rain these days, but the damn kids are worse than the rams. And I thought about using them kids instead, but my son's lawyer advised me against it. So I have to make do with flipping 'em the bird instead.

Re:What's the problem?

[robbiethefett]

you could simply explain to the judge that the wizards who live in the magic machine box have cast a very powerful spell that makes it extremely difficult to get the RAM out. i mean, it's pretty apparent that this judge would take that as a reasonable explanation.

Re:hmm..

[Virgil Tibbs]

I used to have a 5 inch floppy, but its got reduced to three and a half now.... :(

Re:What's the problem?

[Trigun]

Or loan him RAM. Or anything else, for that matter.

Re:HD

[Random832]

IME, it is very common for users to call disk drives "memory". And while geeks like us don't use it that way, it's probably technically correct, both for the everyday and technical meanings of "memory", even though we don't normally use it that way. True, it's not random access memory.

Yes it is.

Re:Oh my. I think you are a fellow old-timer.

[OldManAndTheC++]

We didn't have no acorns so we had to make do with bundles of straw - upright was 1 and tumbled was 0.

Whoa, whoa ... you had ones and zeros?!?!

Luxury!

Re:What's the problem?

[Joe Snipe]

Heluvan excuse (hlvn), noun; colloquialism, slang

1. Any attempt to justify or obtain forgiveness by blaming others.

2. A reference to Steve Heluvan; known for coining the phrase "They made me do it."

other examples of modern colloquialisms include 'allen wrench', 'pulling a homer', and 'jack off'.

Re:invasion of privacy

[cbroglie]

The files are inside the computer!

Re:What's the problem?

[oskay]

I follow you most of the way, but I'm not sure how arsenic, cesium, and darmstadtium fit into this discussion.

I feel a song coming on...

[merikari]

Ah, sorry about that, it was something completely different...

-----

FIRST JUDGE: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of copypasta.

SECOND JUDGE: Nothing like a nice order of Château de RAM, eh, Josiah?

THIRD JUDGE: You're right there, Obadiah.

FOURTH JUDGE: Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here with Château de RAM, eh?

FIRST JUDGE: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup bits.

SECOND JUDGE: A cup o' all zeroes, at that.

FOURTH JUDGE: Without capacitors or electricity.

THIRD JUDGE: Or bits.

FIRST JUDGE: In a cracked cup, an' all.

FOURTH JUDGE: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to carry our RAM in a rolled up newspaper.

SECOND JUDGE: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp SIMM.

THIRD JUDGE: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

FIRST JUDGE: Because we were poor. My old Prof used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".

FOURTH JUDGE: Aye, 'e was right.

FIRST JUDGE: Aye, 'e was.

FOURTH JUDGE: I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to scavenge for bits in this tiny old hall with no ventilation for all the excess heat from the computer cluster.

SECOND JUDGE: A hall! You were lucky to work in a house! We used to have court sessions in one dark room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the memory modules were missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of stepping on one them SIMMs.

THIRD JUDGE: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to chew wires for random bits in t' corridor!

FIRST JUDGE: Oh, we used to dream of workin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to get our RAM from an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of IP lawyers dumped all over us! House? Huh.

FOURTH JUDGE: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND JUDGE: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go to the lake and see if someone had simulated a Turing machine with rocks.

THIRD JUDGE: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us working in a computer case in t' middle o' road.

FIRST JUDGE: A tower case?

THIRD JUDGE: Aye.

FIRST JUDGE: You were lucky. We worked for three months in a mini tower in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, ziplock all the zeroes, eat a crust of stale bread, work pro bono, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home the DOJ cronies would thrash us to sleep wi' a belt.

SECOND JUDGE: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel and simulate a Turing machine with our intestines, work twenty hour day pro bono for tuppence a month, come home, and DOJ would send people to thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

THIRD JUDGE: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of pizza boz-sized case at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue just in case someone had left some bits there. We only ever found two bits, a one and a half a zero, worked twenty-four hours a day pro bono for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our DOJ had already fired us and would send someone to slice us in two wit' bread knife.

FOURTH JUDGE: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day for RIAA, and pay the recording industry for permission to come to work, and when we got home, Gonzales would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST JUDGE: And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

ALL: They won't!

Re:What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a bad example because it was short , what I was saying is it has to count up it ,can't go straight to 0. And that itself prevents the oxide outside from storing the content as another bit , unless it's left there for to long then obviously it gets damaged and falls to another value.

Dear idiot child, we're talking about semiconductor devices -- not one of those little handheld clickers they use for counting people going ino a building. And even those can have all digits reset to zero without wearing out your knuckles (which in your case get enough wear and tear from dragging on the ground).

Re:What's the problem?

[Jon_S]

But...

This RAM goes to 11!

cat /proc/kcore lpr

[tehdaemon]

cat /proc/kcore > lpr
And send the MPAA the bill for a new laser printer, toner and about a thousand reams of paper, and first class postage for shipping it to them.

Rerun this command as often as the printer finishes, (and get more ram *evil grin*)

T

Re:What's the problem?

[Xyrus]

Make the log, copyright it, and then forbid its distribution.

~X~

Re:What's the problem?

[aichpvee]

Why not, most americans think that's how the universe was created. So it only makes sense that computers run on magic, too.

Holy crap. Wow.

[Lethyos]

You did, in fact, just positively smack the shit out of that n00b. Well done.

Re:Err....no.

[omnivagus]

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basicly a capacitor.

Not in modern DRAM. Modern DRAM is basically [sic] a capacitor.

You keep using that word [wikipedia.org]. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:What's the problem?

[Mr2cents]

if you put "cat /dev/mem | uuencode | mail [e-mail]" in a cronjob and let it run every minute, I'm sure he will be more than pleased.

Re:What's the problem?

[cafucu]

All trolls go to hell.

Re:What's the problem?

[fyngyrz]

The only way I can think of to get the contents of RAM chips out is to use acid to dissolve the epoxy cases, snip the little gold wires, then veeewwy veeeewwy carefully pry the silicon off the metal base.

Then you could scrape the chips until the doped silicon, metallization and insulating deposits they contained were out, and then send that along to the judge. I'm sure she wouldn't be interested in the substrate; after all, it never held any data.

I love being ruled by morons, I really do.

Re:What's the problem?

[simm1701]

The big bang was jump started by Lister using the jump leads from star bug

You've seen back to reality right? ;)

Re:is the ruling about physical RAM at all?

[siddesu]

yours is a post with a lot of stuff, but in reality the matter is simple and almost non-technical.
it goeth a bit like the following synopsis:

0. MAFIAA sez in court they needz teh logs to show TS helps copyright infringement
(they want to show stuff like urls and filenames, not l33t hex dumps)
1. the judge agrees that's reasonable, asks TS logfiles.
2. TS replies: OMGLOLZ we don't keep log files and teh data isn't there anywayz
3. the MAFIAA calls expert who sez STFU, while data is in teh RAM you can copy it to a logfile
4. judge says: correctamundo, make the flow of data from RAM to log files happen, and hand in the log files
5. TS goes like: OMG our users business model privacy european lawz LOLZ again!!!!111
6. judge says: take it easy, scratch out IP addresses and deliver the logs only from your US servers

end of story, MAFIAA wins this step, TS sounds not l33t, and that is regardless of what I think of that 'intellectual proprety' stuff, of which I don't think much.