I wouldn’t mourn at all..

People should not treat IP logs as if they are the immutable word of God. Aside from the normal way in which an IP can pass from one person to another, or how many authors can use the same IP, etc… one cannot ignore that IP Logs can be changed after the fact.

I make no accusations. I merely state a fact people should not forget

Well, as the old saying goes "What goes around, comes around" (or maybe a better quote to use would be the old Forrest Gump "Stupid is as Stupid does"). Why anyone would think that they could post stuff like that online and not get in any kind of crap in this day and age is just beyond me. Lord knows it’s situations like these that make me thankful I take the time to think about what I write and choose my words very carefully.

Mike’s ARIN dump contains no real useful information, especially since the entry was updated in the database in 2006. The IP address was apparently used by Mr. Warman in November 2003, and by someone in September 2003 to post the hateful post on Senator Anne Cools.

Mike’s argument that Rogers rotates IP addresses "every three weeks or so" does not conform with my experiences in 2003 with Rogers. I went months with the same IP address, and that included repeatedly powering off the cable modem and attached devices.

Only by releasing my lease did I tend to get a new IP address, and even that was not always certain. This is not a procedure the average computer user goes through, and Mr Warman has stated in testimony that he is no computer expert.

Perhaps my experience is unique; perhaps not.

"Throw in a NAT, and you can’t even tell which computer it was".

This comes across as sophistry. Are you seriously suggesting that Mr Warman and his neighbors were all sharing a single IP address? And that someone else in Mr Warman’s home — or, in contravention of Rogers terms of service, hooked into Mr Warman’s router — made the offending post?

Moreover, the available information, if Free Dominion is posting accurately, and if no one altered the logs at freedomsite, indicates that this was a Windows 98 machine running IE 6.0.

The OS alone (Windows 98) represented about 12% of the internet-browsing computers outstanding in Fall 2003, according to the statistics at w3schools.com. Couple that with the particular browser variant (IE6) and we drop below 10%.

"Consider an open wifi access point and it could have been someone wardriving"

You’re asking us to believe that someone using a computer running Windows 98 and IE6 drove outside Mr Warman’s house — and that he was running a WiFi router in 2003 (which he does not state in testimony, referring only to his computer and his cable modem) and posted racist messages.

Yes, this is possible. No, it is not likely. This would be a laptop equipped with wireless and running Windows 98. A wardriver, with a wireless laptop, in 2003, running Windows 98? Please. This gets into alien abduction territory in terms of probability, for anyone who knows about wardriving.

Similarly, someone spoofing his IP address is highly improbable. Beyond alien abduction territory, in my view. Granted, not impossible, merely astoundingly unlikely.

More likely possibilities:
1. Free Dominion has posted false information. Unlikely but possible.
2. Freedomsite altered its logs. Unlikely, given the withdrawal of the Cools post as an element of complaint. But not impossible.
3. Rogers did indeed reassign the IP, as Mark argues, and someone using the exact same OS and browser as Mr. Warman made a racist post on a lightly trafficked racist website. The most likely explanation, and one that seems improbable. Yet Mr. Warman swears he did not make it; until it is proven otherwise I take him at his word.
4. Racist thugs broke into Mr. Warman’s home in September 2003 and tried to frame him. Unlikely, but not impossible. I put it well ahead of wardriving and alien-abduction-style spoofing.

On the basis of the evidence presented, no reasonable person could conclude, beyond reasonable doubt, that Richard Warman made the disgusting Anne Cools post.

However, in my view, as an engineer who’s worked with DARPANet since the 80’s, and the Internet since then, there is certainly enough evidence at this stage to believe that, on the balance of evidence presented, if it is correct, Richard Warman’s computer was likely used to make the September 2003 Anne Cools post.

This is emphatically not certainty, as I’ve stated above. But to dismiss the case with the arguments that Mike has made smacks of nothing but sophistry.

I’ve no dog in this hunt, as southerners would say. I’m not a conservative blogger, and I don’t regularly post anywhere. (I’ve worked on Wikipedia for years, and I’ve made maybe 20 posts in the last 5 years. But this case has attracted my attention, partly because of the free speech elements, and also because (more recently) of the news about the very disturbing post smashing Senator Cools.

Whoever made that post about Senator Cools is a contemptible excuse for a human being. If it was someone trying to smear Mr. Warman, then he or she is doubly contemptible. If it was Mr Warman himself… well, words fail me.

Re: IP addresses and such.  While it is absolutely correct that NAT, spoofing, wardriving, etc. are possible, it is also correct that they aren’t likely.  And, while narrowing down the addresses to what is apparently the likely network segment for Warman’s connection is indicative, it’s also circumstantial.

However, absolute confirmation of the person IS available, or was - the MAC address of the customer premise router should have been logged by Rogers Cable when it obtained the IP address.  This is how they prevent and record theft of internet service, as it is linked to the customer account, and this data is most likely saved for quite some time.

It’s funny, I have a cousin who is trying to tell me that Roger’s can’t track IP’s of their customers and he can DL’d anything and everything he wants and no one knows lol.

No, he’s not running any program, just thinks that because he’s in Canada where we have few privacy cases going on at the moment, that he can do what he likes. It’s only true up until the point they change the law, but trying to tell him this is like banging your head against the wall lol.