again, no. OP and the rest of this thread is about a ruling in a civil case, where the cause of action is civil copyright infringement. here's a link to the entire docket. Notice how there are no state parties involved? That's because infringement for non-commercial use is a civil violation.

17 USC 506 provides for criminal penalties in cases of infringement for commercial purposes or for financial gain. No one is accusing the downloaders in this case of selling their copies, so 506 is not relevant to this conversation.

no. copyright infringement is a civil violation.

Your personal information is not "private." Your ISP can easily relate your IP address back to your personal information, and they will happily happily do so and then release the information to comply with a subpoena.

I don't know enough about Tor to say whether it might help to conceal your identity from other nodes on the internet... but if it does, that might be enough to avoid this kind of problem.

Read it yourself before you leap to judgment. It's actually pretty easy to grok, as these things go.

If it was a criminal case, you'd have real 4th-Amendment and 1st-Amendment issues. As it is, we're talking about a civil matter, and those constraints don't apply to non-state plaintiffs.

Judge Collyer isn't breaking new ground here- it's generally accepted by US courts that individuals can have no expectation that information they freely give to other persons is "private." I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing "personal" with "private." Your personal information is not necessarily "private," in either the ordinary sense or in the technical legal sense.

Your name is not private. Your street address is not private. Your vehicle license plate number is not private. In many states, your driver's license number and your driving records are not private.

In this case, the USCG is asking the ISP to give up the names and mailing addresses of people who were using certain IP addresses at a given time on a given date. Since names and mailing addresses are not private, neither the ISP nor the people using those addresses can claim "privacy" as a reason not to comply with this request.

That's just how it is. People who are reacting to this with surprise are wrong to blame the judge in this case- her ruling was made according to well-settled law. She cited this portion of her analysis to cases in the 4th and 6th circuit courts of appeals, and there are similar decisions from several of the other circuits as well.

You can read the whole order here: Order denying motion to quash.

Now, if the question was whether your ISP could turn over your DNS logs, effectively showing the list of sites you were connected to and the dates and times of connection... well, that's a very different sort of thing.

(why yes, I am a lawyer working on some of these cases).

In criminal court, yes. This is a civil lawsuit.

Why the HELL does HP want to load stupid monitor apps for every device installed?

They've learned from corporate experience that they need to watch added hardware very closely or it will damage operations. See, e.g., the itanium, the iPaq, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd...

except who wants to go to Lodi? Presumably highway expansion would happen in places where people tend to want to go.

Or, you know, the Palm Treo series. I got my first one in 2003. Still have a 755p now, but shopping for an android to replace it (droid 2 probably, I'm a sucker for hardware keyboard). Palm OS had an open dev environment, free SDK availability, widely distributed app downloads, native ssh and imap clients, the first big (for the time) color touchscreens, data tethering over usb cable and bluetooth, etc etc etc.

Too bad they were so goddamn stupid at actually running a business that they've never made a profit.

And the Pre feels like a piece of junk.

first a nugget of fact, then some commentary:

1. When we moved to Portland, Oregon, we had Qwest come out to the house to rewire one of the phone jacks because the mooks who hooked it up to the outside world crosswired the connections- we didn't even have dial tone. After the tech fixed the problem, first thing he did after confirming DSL sync was to run a speed test. I asked him if that was SOP and he said that he was trained to always run a speed test for new customers- he suggested that it might be part of an upsell but that he doesn't like selling so he never comments (oh, you're only getting 750k down, but you're in an area where 7/1 MB service is available... did you know you can upgrade for just $3.50/month!???? ...). YMMV but if this is SOP for Qwest on installs, there is one population of regular testers.

2. I agree with earlier commenters- there is probably a self-selecting sampling bias.

3. Because of #2, any "data" they collect is probably very skewed towards computer-savvy users who are demanding higher-speed services and using their website to check if the service they're getting matches what they're paying for. Unless there are some details of the methodology that they're not telling us about, the survey probably reports higher bandwidth than actually is delivered to the majority of people with net access in those cities. If it's just a simple aggregation & average of whoever decides to click on speedtest.com from inside a given city's IP range, well, that probably tells you something... but it's probably not a good proxy for a complete picture of "last mile" connectivity.

I am intrigued by your ideas and I wish to subscribe to your news-letter.

and here I thought I was coming to read a post about Romanesco Broccoli (link goes to gis for "romanesco"). Seriously, it's like eating math.

anyone who thinks different from me isn't necessarily weird, but if they arrive at a different conclusion than I reached, they're most likely wrong.

funny. You are my new hero.