The World Wide Web Consortium is pressing ahead with its project to standardize a DRM system for the web, without taking any legal steps to protect people whose legitimate activities would be impaired by the DRM system. Read the rest

Kids Pass is a service that offers discounts on family activities in the UK; their website makes several common -- and serious -- security problems that could allow hackers to capture their users' passwords, which endangers those users' data on other services where they have (unwisely) recycled those same passwords. Read the rest

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions is the respected global body representing libraries all over the world; in an open letter to the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization says the recent decision to standardize DRM for the web has undermined the web's openness and the ability of libraries and other public institutions to fulfill their important social role. Read the rest

Yesterday's smashing Net Neutrality campaign showed that people have finally woken up to the risks of the highly concentrated telcoms sector using its commercial muscle to decide what kinds of services can flourish in the online world -- but Big Internet doesn't confine its efforts to control the future to playing around with packets. Read the rest

[[Update, July 13: After consultation with W3C CEO Jeff Jaffe on timing, we've temporarily withdrawn this appeal, for one week, for purely logistical purposes. I am teaching a workshop all next week at UC San Diego and will re-file the objection at the end of the week, so that I will be able to devote undivided attention to garnering the necessary support from other W3C members. -Cory]]

Five days ago, the World Wide Web Consortium announced that it would go ahead with its project of making DRM for web-video, and that the Director, Tim Berners-Lee had overruled or decided not to act further on all objections about the dangers this posed to legitimate and important activities including security audits, accessibility adaptation and competition. Read the rest

It's the Day Against DRM, and EFF is celebrating by publishing the first public look at How Much Do Consumers Value Interoperability? Evidence from the Price of DVD Players, a scholarly economics paper that uses clever techniques to reveal some eye-popping number on the strangled market for DRM-free gadgets. Read the rest

It's been nearly four months since the W3C held the most controversial vote in its decades-long history of standards-setting: a vote where accessibility groups, security experts, browser startups, public interest groups, human rights groups, archivists, research institutions and other worthies went up against trillions of dollars' worth of corporate muscle: the world's largest electronics, web, and content companies in a battle for the soul of the open web. Read the rest

Medical devices have long been the locus of information security's scariest failures: from the testing and life-support equipment in hospitals to the implants that go in your body: these systems are often designed to harvest titanic amounts of data about you, data you're not allowed to see that's processed by code you're not allowed to audit, with potential felony prosecutions for security researchers who report defects in these systems (only partially mitigated by a limited exemption that expires next year). What's more, it can get much worse. Read the rest

Today, activists will gather in Cambridge, Mass to march to the offices of W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee to urge him to keep DRM out of the standards for the open web. Read the rest

Persirai is a new strain of Internet of Things malware that infects more than 1,250 models of security camera, all manufactured by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer that has sold at least 185,000 units worldwide. Read the rest

It's been a year since we warned that Intel's Management Engine -- a separate computer within your own computer, intended to verify and supervise the main system -- presented a terrifying, unauditable security risk that could lead to devastating, unstoppable attacks. Guess what happened next? Read the rest

Tim Wu, the Colombia University law professor and anti-trust/competition expert who coined the term "Net Neutrality," has published an open letter to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Read the rest

Brewster Kahle, who invented the first two search engines and went on to found and run the Internet Archive has published an open letter describing the problems that the W3C's move to standardize DRM for the web without protecting otherwise legal acts, like archiving, will hurt the open web. Read the rest

The Just Net Coalition -- whose membership roll includes leading human rights organisations from across the global south -- have written urgently to the World Wide Web Coalition and its founder, Tim Berners-Lee, calling on him to intervene to stop the Consortium from publishing its first-ever DRM standard, a system for restricting video streams called Encrypted Media Extensions. Read the rest

Bruce Schneier takes to the pages of Technology Review to remind us all that while botnets have been around for a long time, the Internet of Things is supercharging them, thanks to insecurity by design. Read the rest

German Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda (previously) has published an open-letter signed by UK MEP Lucy Anderson, raising alarm at the fact that the W3C is on the brink of finalising a DRM standard for web video, which -- thanks to crazy laws protecting DRM -- will leave users at risk of unreported security vulnerabilities, and also prevent third parties from adapting browsers for the needs of disabled people, archivists, and the wider public. Read the rest

With two days to go until the close of the World Wide Web Consortium members' poll on finalising DRM and publishing it as an official web standard, the UK Open Rights Group is asking Britons to write to the Consortium and its founder, Tim Berners-Lee, to advocate for a much-needed, modest compromise that would protect the open web from the world's bizarre, awful, overreaching DRM laws. Read the rest