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I lol'd.
And then I lol'd again.
Well, on whole node you are bound to find at least a seed box or a fake watches shop if not some spamvertised sites or DNSes for them.
I dont think anyone in their right mind can swear their servers are absolutely clean.
@shovenose cuz they shoved in HDD not in RAM :P
Umm, I can.
They get washed with soapy water daily.
Sure, but that doesnt happen on all and doesnt happen immediately, so you can be almost sure there is a problem someplace.
It is not provider's business to spy on customers and police should limit the searches to the VM in question, any other data found should be inadmissible in court the same that searching the wrong address by mistake and finding something cannot be the basis for a trial, not even further warrants.
@Maounique, agree about not spying.
But if you aren't dealing with abuse issues, it would seem inevitable that the police some seizing things...
So you are saying ramhost did not act on abuse complaints ? Even so, the ppl complaining can take it to court, this will not warrant any equipment confiscation.
It can be proved otherwise that the infringing material was on at a certain time, otherwise no torrenter case will hold in court without the actual hard drives (as some ppl suggested).
Strange. When we had one of our drives seized (also by the German police), they just took the first drive and left the mirror; so it was just a quick fiddle in grub; a resync and no more issues.
Kinda hard with raid 5 i think. But it is a good thing they were considerate enough and I think the reaction of the online community is forcing some changes.
10 years ago would have shot down the entire DC for an exit node.
So all I have to do is assign a VM in my client's name, fake some log entries to show external connections while I run through vzctl, and the law can't touch me. Pretty easy loophole
I still say the whole computer is evidence until proven otherwise. The provider is not a legal authority. The system is as much theirs as their clients, and their clients don't exist just because they say they exist. I can't remember a lot of times where "Officer I swear that isn't mine" was a strong legal defense. They can look over everything and figure out that it's true, but I'm not under the impression that they should take my word for it.
Just my opinion. Thinking from a legal perspective more than a convenience or personal perspective. They have a job to do same as me.
Right now, law is punishing hosts worse than offenders, like an exact disk image/copy won't suffice. If police just copied every single byte of the disk and then put it back then there would no real harm be done expect for some downtime.
Right now, when your VPS drives are raided, you won't get them back, MAYBE after 3 years. Good example of the extreme unawareness is:
Actually, as a provider I can find much better ways, such as getting an unused vm and use it as a proxy making sure it doesnt save any logs. That is a loophole no disk yanking will beat.
I could also frame anyone (this is one of the reasons I have no BuyVM box after the love Aldryic showed me) and no prosecutor/judge will be able to prove it was tampered with. If I am considerate enough I can make it look like it was hacked. Or use an already hacked box for that matter, that will be the perfect cover, right ? Sure beats the vzctl+faking logs you outlined above.
What does this mean ?
1. Dont be so sure there is no framing involved for privacy advocates and dissidents;
2. Police is made of humans which can and will answer at the call of superiors or even friends/bribers. Maybe police can be trusted more than a provider, but yanking a drive and finding some files there is not a proof beyond any reason of a doubt that the vm owner is the guilty part, not much different than a copy provided by the provider. After all, why are they to keep copies and logs if those dont matter except if you have the drive ?
A clever hacker bent on intent to frame someone will be able to plant files there, cover tracks and then tip the feds, even without any help from the provider.
I can visit your house, leave a backdoor on the computer under the pretext I need to check my mail, plant some "evidence" there, send some compromising mails, access some obvious honeypots, dont even need to tip the police...
Is that enough to ruin someone's life ? Sadly, it seems so. So easy if the files on some computer are enough evidence.
Problem goes back to the computer and data not being a crime. The crime isn't the bits and information, but rather the action of having done something illegal that lives at or originated from that IP address.
That's why seizure is idiotic. What are they hoping to find? A video copy of the misdoer doing whatever was illegal? His/her home phone number? Identity?
They seize stuff to vacuum data and build their lousy databases. If your data was on that same server, now your details are being plugged into government databases and information systems. That's swell ehh?
If fingerprints can be taken and stored from individuals not involved in any investigation and kept even after they were cleared, why not ?
There was a time when only criminals had biological data stored in other places than hospitals and personal doctor files.
The accused and innocent should never have anything retained. It's another miscarriage of justice.
Of course you can however that's not a point. @jarland very realisticly described situation how things are not how they should be in some perfect world. They don't know upfront who did it. All what they know is who ordered DC service and paid invoice. Not much to work with unless you confiscate data storage to research further.
At least I am using @William 's HK data center, I think EU police will never go to HK to seize their HDDs?!
What jarland says, basically, is that police can confiscate anything they consider is evidence (rather can be, because only the court decides if that is evidence or not).
While I agree that some inconvenience for the provider and other customers is unavoidable, (after all, we see areas sealed and roads inaccessible too) the police does not excavate the road and does not take the part with the blood or skid marks for further analysis after a car accident, they can take some pictures, get samples, done in a few hours at most including the time needed to get there. They also do not search every car 10 miles in any direction from the location.
Blocking cars is not much more inconvenient than blocking data, at times lives can depend on it and the "they can use another provider" argument is the same as "they can take an alternate route", not to mention they are punishing the provider in the process, while the roads are public in most cases and only customers/citizens suffer.
Should the road company be liable for the criminals passing by ? The shootout ? The car accidents (unless clearly they didnt respect the law regarding safety) ?
It looks like you agree that in the IT industry the infrastructure owner is liable and/or has to do police work against own customers and everyone is guilty until proven otherwise.
@Maounique how on earth they can know who's abuser without taking and seeing evidence? Are they psychic?
You said in one of your previous posts that they should contact RAMhost and ask them about VM or something like that... Huh? Are you serious? Sorry, but this would be just stupid as there's not way to clean RAMhost of guilty without seeing evidence (disk data). As far as I know those dedicated servers don't come with enclosed extensive and undeniable list of all clients, subclients and clients of those subclients and their clients... with IPs of everyone, logs and all the rest near each server so get it real. There's only one name written, one to start with and that's the name of person who ordered and paid (who own) service (ie. RAMhost). Or you really believe that ther is some higher autority, some aura of immunity which make hosts by default innocent.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying that RAMhost made something nasty - they are most likely victim of one of their client but do you really believe that police should take a word on that without checking evidence?
btw. sometimes is very hard to read your arguments like those above because they have nothing to do with this real situation we talk about. Use some common sense. You rent a server and give me access, I do something nasty - and then you expect that police will know that it wasn't you and request only my data + give you chance to remove all the rest? Get it real...
how to avoid this whole situation would be to not do anything illegal. But not realistic
@Spirit I think you do not follow the arguments here.
I thought everyone is innocent until proven guilty ? Nobody should need to "clean" anything before a court decision incriminating them.
http://bgp.he.net/AS53841
There it is said that ramhost owns some IP space and the site clearly shows it is a provider. So they will know that ramhost is like comcast, amazon, hurricane electric, cogent, etc. They are providers, not end-users for most of their services, therefore, the same way they go to AT&T and ask for the call list of someone and dont need to clear AT&T first, they can go to ramhost and ask the data.
That will be much cleaner as they will probably be able to provide more than just the data itself, but logs, traffic level and other things and even help them by cooperating in the limit of the warrant and keep the suspected VM under observation.
That would be nice police work that would benefit all parties, but, yeah, the everyone is guilty until proven innocent has some issues, the paranoid cannot cooperate because they trust nobody.
This kind of action is not meant to find out the truth, it is intended to intimidate and hurt ppl which are perceived as not doing enough to stop "piracy" and/or fight spy laws. It is intended to teach a lesson, to set examples, scare people into complying.
If your business depends on it, what is a bit of illegal surveillance and giving a few names of torrenters ? After all, it just cuts through the red tape, who needs court orders and warrants when intimidation works so well ?
@Maounique sometimes it would be way easier to discuss with you if you would use some common sense instead live in a "dreamland" based on how you feel about some things not how things are. Someone above said "The system is as much theirs as their clients, and their clients don't exist just because they say they exist." and this pretty much says all.
It's just your personal feeling about who should get immunity from investigation not how world function to get some evident results. But because I still like you (disregarding you being annoying here and there) I will slowly move my a$$ away from this thread instead going into further argument about your personal feelings how world should function. No hard feelings bro ;-)
The law is pretty clear, any proof obtained through "research" in a privately owned space without a warrant or beyond the scope of a warrant is not admissible in court. That is the law in most democratic countries, I didnt make it.
The law also states that everyone is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.
That is also not an invention coming from my dreamland, but i can see it turning into one if the current sliding into a police state is not stopped.
From the above two:
Ramhost is not guilty and as any provider can be asked for the data and trusted to offer the correct one, otherwise there are penalties for them too. If they had proof and a warrant against ramhost, they should have taken all their servers, billing panel and all.
If they could trust ramhost or the datacenter to send them to the right server, they could trust them with the correct copy too. After all, the datacenter might not even know the correct server with the incriminated IP without checking some stuff on routers owned by ramhost first. Unless they only had one server there, which I find it very hard to believe.
Anything they will find on the server, on any other machine except the one in question identified by IP probably will NOT be admissible in court, I mean, in a normal court that respects the law and we agree they all should.
It sounds like the police didn't do any research or even look at it they might of classed it as a dedicated server or just didn't looked and pulled both drives guessing there were in Raid0 or 2 different partitions on a dedicated server, I still think most governments and police have to much power on some things and don't work enough with the victims (Hosting Providers) Its like the guy who got raided for a hosting tor exit node, They didn't try and find proof before just taking hardware its basically theft but on a Legal level, But on the other hands is their an effective way to catch abusers? As at this point it seems there are things they could of done to lessen the impact but they didn't as it would cost more or take more time. Least they are my thoughts.
Everyone is innocent until proven guilty and
Evidence obtained by searching privately owned space without or beyond the scope of a warrant is not admissible in court are two basic principles of any democratic country law.
If you say in Germany you need to prove you are innocent I wont believe you or anyone else. If it was the case, Germany was not in EU.
Yeah but Germany's search and seizure laws may vary from US laws, so there may be some sort of a discrepancy there.
I think in the US it would be more controlled at least, and they would contact the host + data center before hand.
Yeah, right!
Or maybe shutdown whole DC and arrest host before hand?
I wouldn't even dare to compare "consumer rights", "privacy protection" etc in US with strict EU regulations.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15221111/#.URMfQ2c0PDd
There is one more possible explanation for why the HDDs were taken.
Police had an order to seize IP x.x.x.x. They tracerouted, saw that it goes to a certain data center.
They went to the data center with the court order and wanted that IP.
There was nobody from ramhost's staff there (since they are in USA i think?). So the DC techs checked the IP and identified where it is routed, and identified the MAC address to which this IP maps. Then they saw on which switch port this MAC address is connected, and from the switch port they figured out which server this is.
There was nobody who could login to that server and see that there are virtual machines in there and to offer to copy just the data of the virtual machine of interest. So all the police could do is take the whole server (or just the HDDs).
Moral of the story: doing high density virtualisation is risky. The higher the density, the higher the risk.
Moral of the story 2: offering services out of a remote data center is also risky.
Moral of the story 3: do whatever you can to discourage people who could be of interest to the authorities to host with you.
I agree with the rest and even this, but you know it cant be helped.
No matter what you do, or the police does, there is always a risk.
Say, you can screen out 50% of the potential customers to lower the risk 10%, but raids will happen as long as the judges allow them and property will be seized as long as the owners do not sue and request for high damages afraid they will be raided out of business as a retaliation.