On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 19:04 -0700, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: > There have been a few fun cases where RIAA subpoenas have been sent to IPs > that were actually permanently assigned to a university laser printer > (duke? tufts?)
yeah, but also lots of cases where law enforcement used IP addresses to track down individuals who may or may not have done anything wrong. well, of course law enforcement can do that, but if something is useful for them as having a high chance of identifying an individual, it's useful to anyone else too. the argument that theoretically, IPs could be non-personal is made frequently by ISPs but for some reason ISPs just don't provide the facts to back that up, which should be easy for them, more than anyone else. what are the probabilities that when X logs in repeatedly as [EMAIL PROTECTED] from 2 or 3 specific IP addresses over a few weeks that you can identify X as the person with access to that email address? and that you can identify the address X accessed the email address from? i'd say the chances are pretty high, and the ISPs have the data that _could_ suggest otherwise - if in fact IPs are as useless as identifying people as they claim. -rishab
