In this episode of the Security Ledger Podcast (#188), sponsored* by LastPass, we take a look at the fast-expanding world of crowdsourced surveillance by doing a deep dive on Flock Safety, a start up that sells inexpensive license plate scanners to homeowners and police departments. Also: users know that password security is important…but they can’t seem to change their insecure behavior. In our second segment, We talk about why with Katie Petrillo of LogMeIn and LastPass.
In this week’s Security Ledger Podcast (#84): The 1990s era Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it a crime to subvert copy protections in software and hardware. We speak with Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about his group’s efforts to win an exemption from that law for voice assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Also: February is Black History Month in the United States. We interview Corey Thomas, the Chief Executive Officer of the firm Rapid 7 about what it means to be a black man in the information security industry and about his path to the field.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking the Library of Congress to give owners of voice assistant devices like Amazon’s Echo, Google Home and other voice assistants the right to “jailbreak” the devices: freeing them from content control features designed to prevent users from running unauthorized code on those platforms.
In-brief: After a year in limbo, the Librarian of Congress moved last week to allow a number of exceptions to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that will clear the way for researchers to explore smart vehicles and other products.
In-brief: Manufacturers are using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent farmers and heavy equipment owners from repairing their own machinery. But efforts in a number of states are pushing a “right to repair” citing the DMCA’s cost to small business owners and the stifling effect on start ups and potentially new industries.
