DMCA

Episode 84: Free Alexa! Cory Doctorow on jailbreaking Voice Assistants and hacking diversity with Rapid7’s Corey Thomas

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.

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Voice Assistants

EFF Seeks Right to Jailbreak Alexa, Voice Assistants

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. 

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Hobbled by DMCA, Farmers are jail breaking Tractors | Motherboard

In-brief: Hobbled by draconian copyright restrictions from manufacturers like John Deere that make it impossible to modify or repair equipment, farmers in the U.S. have turned to unofficial software produced in countries like Ukraine to maintain their equipment. 

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Fixing farm equipment

Right to Repair on the Ropes in Minnesota | Motherboard

In-brief: Proposed legislation to prevent manufacturers from denying owners and independent repair people to fix and maintain software-based products is being sidelined by opposition from private firms like equipment maker John Deere, Motherboard reports.

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DMCA Exemptions will Boost IoT Security Research

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. 

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