Because it’s a FUCK YOU FRIDAY…

Originally posted (and terribly reported) @ CNET

(C’mon now, this quote makes me laugh chunks):

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

Regardless, the real issue here is:

Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

“While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,” U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. “Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.”

TL;DR version: Most consumer-class routers/access points today don’t store nearly enough information to be useful in a forensic sense… unless their firmware is flashed with something like Tomato or DD-WRT (which offers more robust logging options).  Training your average Joe/Jane on how to store these logs in a forensically sound manner would be almost impossible, or take way too much money to properly educate the masses.