Legal News

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.

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. 

Episode 78: Meltdown and Spectre with Joe Unsworth of Gartner and will GDPR spark a Data War in 2018?

In this week’s Security Ledger podcast, Joe Unsworth has been covering the semiconductor space for Gartner for 15 years, but he’s never seen anything like Meltdown and Spectre, the two vulnerabilities that Google researchers identified in a wide range of microprocessors. In this podcast, Joe comes in to talk with us about what the flaws will mean for major chip vendors. Also: we kick off 2018 with a pair of predictions for the New Year from two of the smartest guys in the information security business. Lawyer and Lawfare blogger Paul Rosenzweig speaks with us about the year ahead including the possibility of a data war between the US and the EU. Also: Experian VP for Consumer Protection Mike Bruemmer comes in to talk to us about that company’s Data Breach Industry Forecast for 2018.

NSA Surveillance Law Expiring amid Partisan Divisions | The Parallax

The folks over at The Parallax write that time is running out on a U.S. spy law that allows the National Security Agency to run its most controversial surveillance programs, with no clear replacement plan in place.

Podcast: New Malware targets Industrial Safety Systems and Uncle Sam Bans Kaspersky – What Now?

In our latest podcast: industrial security expert Joe Weiss talks to us about Triton, a new malware family targeting industrial safety systems. Also: Dave Aitel of the firm Immunity Inc. joins us again to talk about new legislation banning government agencies from using anti malware software by Kaspersky Lab. And, Alan Naumann* of the firm Contrast Security talks to us about the major insurance firm that  joined the latest round of investment in his company, and why application security is everybody’s problem.