Researchers Expose Locations of Pirate Bay Uploaders
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Matching that to the initial seeder should be pretty trivial so long as you get to the torrent quickly enough after it was first seeded so you can see who the only person with 100% is. Even if you can't get to it before there are a handful of seeders, you should be able to narrow it down by looking for the common IP among several torrents.
What hope is there for being able to exchange massive amounts of data in an anonymous fashion?
Because of the "walking around" part.
In 2005 I could find random apartment-dwellers with open wifi, but things have changed. Even cafes use passwords to make sure you bought something there.
I visited a town in Alaska this summer that had a McDonald's with an open hub -- no password. I asked about it, and the proprietor said it was open to attract people to his business, and he didn't care that some people cheated, especially because the cheaters needed to gather around his place of business (to get adequate signal strength), making it look popular and attracting paying customers.
But a hub that has a password is a different story. In that case, you can't claim not to know the behavior is fraud.
I'm pretty scared for anonymity on the internet in the next decade. Even with just email, you can take total precautions on your own end: host your own mail server, always use SSL, and so on, but if your emails aren't PGP encrypted (and let's face it, PGP is too hard to comprehend for mere mortals, which is who you'll be communicating with most of the time), there's always going to be a copy of your communications on the recipient's mail server: Google, Hotmail, etc.
Never before in history has a complete and total record of all of your mail ever sent in your entire life been available for government snooping. But that's the reality today--all the government has to do is ask your email provider--or one of your contact's email providers--nicely.
Germany is absolutely a Wifi nightmare, I was traveling around Europe last year, and in Poland you could get Wifi basically anywhere, hell, i got online while running form one train to another at some random train station in the middle of nowhere.
Then I arrived to Berlin, and what a change, I spent hours trying to find a place to get online.
The problem in Germany is totally insane laws, and a population too brainwashed into following every silly rule.
In any case, cracking closed Wifi networks is relatively easy, and will (which is why is silly to close your wifi, because if somebody uses it for something nasty, you will have much more trouble showing that it wasn't you, while if it is open everyone understands that anyone could have done it).
If you are in the US (and in some other countries), you know it's illegal, right?
Not necessarily. An open WiFi hub can represent a free service offered by, for example, a restaurant or lodging establishment, both of which expect and accept public logons in order to attract business. It's not obvious how an individual might distinguish between these hubs and a private hub that happens not to have a password.
If someone decided to prosecute a user of an open hub, they would have to shoulder the burden of evidence to prove that a person knowingly defrauded the hub operator, rather than innocently accessed a public resource.
If the hub has a password, that's a different story altogether, but in the case of an open WiFi hub, the burden is on law enforcement to prove that an individual knowingly stole the service. Innocent until proven guilty.
Imagine someone driving along a public road, next to a drive-in theater. He pulls over and watches the movie over the top of an inadequate fence. Is he guilty of a crime?
Imagine someone walking along a street who stops and reads the newspaper headlines through the front of a newspaper vending machine. Is he guilty of a crime?
Both the above examples would require the prosecutor to prove "guilty knowledge", knowledge that the behavior was wrong. It's the same with open WiFi hubs. There are plenty of open hubs that are intentionally public, and that accept logons from anyone. And there are hubs owned by unsophisticated computer owners that don't have a password simply because the owner doesn't know how to set one up. Is the public required to distinguish between these cases, or face prosecution? No.
No, it's not.
You are not supposed to use a wi-fi, even if it's open (that is, unlocked), unless you have specifically see it advertised as freely available to the public (i.e in an airport, a cafe, etc).
>Not necessarily. An open WiFi hub can represent a free service offered by, for example, a restaurant or lodging establishment, both of which expect and accept public logons in order to attract business. It's not obvious how an individual might distinguish between these hubs and a private hub that happens not to have a password.
You're not supposed to distinguish between them. You are only supposed to use the restaurant or lodging hub when you are AT the restaurant or the hotel, as a customer. And you're supposed to know which is their wifi name.
Being in a cafe that offers free public wifi doesn't give you an excuse to bypass the law and connect to any open nearby Wifi signal you can get ("But, Judge, I couldn't tell which was which").
Many service providers that depend on open WiFi hubs would vigorously disagree. There are a great number of places where open, unsecured WiFi hubs are intended to be accessed by the public, and there are an equal number of client programs that connect up to an open hub and alert the user that a service has been located -- all automatically. Reference:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2193989_connect-wifi-wireless.html
Also, those WiFi hubs that serve as a portal to a paid service often use an open, unsecured hub as a gateway. In this case, the user is meant to log on automatically and then open a browser to complete the authentication process. If people believed they weren't allowed to log onto an open hub, this system would collapse.
> Being in a cafe that offers free public wifi doesn't give you an excuse to bypass the law and connect to any open nearby Wifi signal you can get ...
As shown above, this is simply wrong. Some hubs require a password, some do not. Of the latter, some hope you will log on to begin an authentication process, some hope you will log on just to drum up business.
I visited a town in Alaska this summer that had a McDonald's with an open hub -- no password. I asked about it, and the proprietor said it was open to attract people to his business, and he didn't care that some people used it without buying anything, especially because the lurkers needed to gather around his place of business (to get adequate signal strength), making it look popular and attracting paying customers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking#United...
Or:
Using a neighbor's wireless access point may not be legal even with their permission. The answer varies depending on the policies of residential Internet service providers and plans among other factors. (...) Many U.S. states prohibit unauthorized access to computer networks including open Wi-Fi networks. While interpretations of these laws may vary, some precedents have been set in recent years:
2007 - a man in Michigan was fined for using the Wi-Fi hotspot of a local cafe, from his car 2006 - Illinois man David Kauchak was fined for unauthorized use of a local agency's Wi-Fi access point 2005 - a Florida man faced felony charges for piggybacking onto a neighbor's Internet connection without their permission
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wirelessfaqs/f/legal_free...
And:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/pr_burning_wifi_squatt...
http://tndf.net/tndf/currentbill.htm
Partial quote: "It is an offense for any person, knowingly and with the intent to defraud a communication service provider ..." (emphasis added)
The burden of evidence for an "intent to defraud" lies with the prosecutor, not the plaintiff. (IANAL)