On Monday, the Supreme Court will review the 9th Circuit's decision in Apple Inc. v. Pepper, in which the plaintiffs argue that Apple has established a monopoly over apps for Ios (this part is actually incontrovertible, as Apple has used both technology and law to prevent rival app stores from operating), and that Iphone and Ipad owners have a right to ask the government to break up this monopoly (that's the controversial part).
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Jonathan Zittrain (previously) writes, "There’s reason to worry about security for the ever-growing Internet of Things, and it’ll be tempting to encourage vendors to solely control their devices that much more, limiting interoperability or user tinkering. There are alternatives - models for maintaining firmware patches for orphaned devices, and a 'Faraday mode' so that iffy devices can still at least partially function even if they’re not able to remain safely online. Procrastination around security has played a key role in its success. But 'later' shouldn’t mean 'never' for the IoT."
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Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks America about the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM even for legal reasons, and America gets to answer with requests for exemptions to this rule.
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Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks America about the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM even for legal reasons, and America gets to answer with requests for exemptions to this rule.
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EFF supporter Benjamin McLean was kind enough to send along his "Mashup Maker" as a new entry to EFF Catalog of Missing Devices, a tour through some of the legitimate, useful and missing gadgets, tools and services that don't exist but should. They're technologies whose chance to exist was snuffed out by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes tampering with "Digital Rights Management" into a legal no-go zone, scaring off toolsmiths, entrepreneurs, and tinkerers.
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UPDATE: The event at Flyleaf is at 6PM, not 7!
I'm delivering the annual Kilgour lecture tomorrow morning at 10AM at UNC, and I'll be speaking at Flyleaf Books at 6PM -- be there or be oblong!
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Join me, EFF attorney Kit Walsh and iFixit's Kyle Wiens -- along with special guests! -- in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session tomorrow (Thursday) from 11AM-3PM Pacific; we'll be talking about the upcoming Copyright Office hearings on creating exceptions to the DMCA to make room for independent repair and security research. We'll be live here at 11AM tomorrow! Pass it on.
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When EFF launched its Catalog of Missing Devices, we invited EFF supporters to come up with their own ideas for gadgets that should exist, but don't, because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act bans breaking DRM, even for the most legitimate of purposes.
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The subprime car-lending industry -- charging exorbitant rates for car-loans to people least suited to afford them, enforced through orwellian technologies, obscuring the risk by spinning the debt into high-risk/high-yield bonds -- is collapsing.
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Update: due to popular demand, we've moved to a bigger space! We'll be at UCLA Moore Hall, Room 3340 (Reading Room), 457 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095. There's 20 new spaces open: RSVP today!
A law intended to stop people from making off-brand DVD players now means that security researchers can’t warn you about dangers from the cameras in your bedroom; that mechanics can’t fix your car; and that your printer won’t take third party ink.
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Saleem Rashid is a 15 year old self-taught British programmer who discovered a fatal defect in the Ledger Nano S, an offline cryptocurrency wallet that is marketed as being "tamper-proof."
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The Security Innovation Center is a lobbying group backed by CompTIA, CTIA, TechNet and the Consumer Technology Association for the express purpose of fighting laws that would legalize repairing your own property, or choosing to have it repaired by third parties.
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In
Did Congress Really Expect Us to Whittle Our Own Personal Jailbreaking Tools? -- a new post on EFF's Deeplinks blog -- I describe the bizarre, unfair and increasingly salient US Copyright Office DMCA exemptions process, which is underway right now.
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Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks for proposals for exemptions to Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM; in 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a broad "jailbreaking" exemption to modify the firmware of phones and tablets; this year, we're asking for that permission to be extended to smart speakers like Alexa/Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePods, and the smaller players in the market.
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Motherboard's short documentary, "Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech's Repair Monopoly" is an excellent look at the absurd situation created by John Deere's position that you can't own your tractor because you only license the software inside it, meaning that only Deere can fix Deere's tractors, and the centuries-old tradition of farmers fixing their agricultural equipment should end because Deere's shareholders would prefer it that way.
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For a couple years now, I've been collaborating with EFF to produce a Catalog of Missing Devices: products that do something legal and useful and desirable, but don't exist because to make them, you'd have to break DRM, something US law bans.
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Back in 2016, we published a good technological explainer about Intel's Management Engine, an evolution of the decade-plus old idea of "Trusted Computing," in which a separate, isolated system-on-a-chip lives alongside of your computer, performing cryptographic work and overseeing the functions of your computer.
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