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The main alibi was that he was in the library where he would sometimes check his email after school. Question: Why can't they ask whoever his email provider was

The main alibi was that he was in the library where he would sometimes check his email after school. Question: Why can't they ask whoever his email provider was if there's record of him signing in after school? Why didn't they ask the library if they kept logs on the computers? If a court asked yahoo for some sort of log record from 1999 would they even have it? I suspect they would. Would adnan even remember his email address from then?

duskwuff 10y ago
If they asked for those records now? Not a chance. Yahoo's webmail infrastructure has undoubtedly changed numerous times in the last 17 years; there's absolutely no way they would have bothered to retain IP address logs across all of those migrations.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  No way. The validity of backwards looking data on every project I've ever worked on is sacrosanct.
  - pfranz 10y ago
    I remember hearing (I can't remember where) they contacted the ISP and they no longer had logs or maybe even the email account. There was some funny-business too, if I remember. I work in film. Once the delivery is out the door the 'pieces' are generally archived, but even a few months later they don't fit together again. Trying to recreate the data when working on a sequel, for instance, even only a year later is a bit like the restoring the Xerox Alto series posted last week.
    - TwoBit 10y ago
      I've had the same problem in game development. A few years after you've shipped a game, you can't build tje source code any more because it's dependent on tools that aren't supported any more. It's not quite that bad, but true preservability is hard because all the tools need to be preserved too.
  - anf 10y ago
    Backwards compatibility is one thing, but maintaining access logs is a bit different.
  - Clobbersmith 10y ago
    Yahoo employee here, we have a 18 month retention period. After which data is, at the very least, anonymized. https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/privacy/topics/datastorage/index.htm https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/privacy/topics/datast...
CPLX 10y ago
As someone who was an adult and working with computers in 1999 the first thing that comes to mind is that storage was way more expensive back then. I remember paying a ton of money around then for an Iomega ZIP drive that held 160MB on disks that cost $99 each if I recall correctly. The idea that massive amounts of inconsequential log data with little business purpose from that era is just lying around is not very plausible.
macspoofing 10y ago
>If a court asked yahoo for some sort of log record from 1999 would they even have it? I suspect they would. I don't think they would today. But you raise a good point. The investigation was sloppy. For example, the alibi of the then current boyfriend of Hae, turned out to be forged, but none of the investigators bothered to follow-up on it. The library had video cameras, with copies held for a few weeks, again the investigators never bothered following up on those either.

duskwuff 10y ago

If they asked for those records now? Not a chance. Yahoo's webmail infrastructure has undoubtedly changed numerous times in the last 17 years; there's absolutely no way they would have bothered to retain IP address logs across all of those migrations.

JBReefer 10y ago
No way. The validity of backwards looking data on every project I've ever worked on is sacrosanct.
- pfranz 10y ago
  I remember hearing (I can't remember where) they contacted the ISP and they no longer had logs or maybe even the email account. There was some funny-business too, if I remember. I work in film. Once the delivery is out the door the 'pieces' are generally archived, but even a few months later they don't fit together again. Trying to recreate the data when working on a sequel, for instance, even only a year later is a bit like the restoring the Xerox Alto series posted last week.
  - TwoBit 10y ago
    I've had the same problem in game development. A few years after you've shipped a game, you can't build tje source code any more because it's dependent on tools that aren't supported any more. It's not quite that bad, but true preservability is hard because all the tools need to be preserved too.
- anf 10y ago
  Backwards compatibility is one thing, but maintaining access logs is a bit different.
- Clobbersmith 10y ago
  Yahoo employee here, we have a 18 month retention period. After which data is, at the very least, anonymized. https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/privacy/topics/datastorage/index.htm https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/privacy/topics/datast...

CPLX 10y ago

As someone who was an adult and working with computers in 1999 the first thing that comes to mind is that storage was way more expensive back then. I remember paying a ton of money around then for an Iomega ZIP drive that held 160MB on disks that cost $99 each if I recall correctly. The idea that massive amounts of inconsequential log data with little business purpose from that era is just lying around is not very plausible.

macspoofing 10y ago

>If a court asked yahoo for some sort of log record from 1999 would they even have it? I suspect they would. I don't think they would today. But you raise a good point. The investigation was sloppy. For example, the alibi of the then current boyfriend of Hae, turned out to be forged, but none of the investigators bothered to follow-up on it. The library had video cameras, with copies held for a few weeks, again the investigators never bothered following up on those either.