Deeplinks Blog posts about DRM
As the devices in our homes get "smarter," are they also going to spy on us? That question has led to one sentence in Samsung's SmartTV privacy policy getting a lot of attention lately:
Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.
The comparisons to 1984's two-way "telescreens" are straightforward. This kind of language suggests that while you're watching TV, Big Brother may be watching (or listening to) you. Samsung has taken to its blog for an explanation and edited the policy, but that has not assuaged everybody's concerns.
When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important to your childhood. But unfortunately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. § 1201, or Section 1201) creates legal risks for players who want to keep playing after game servers shut down, and curators who want to preserve games for posterity. That’s why I’m spearheading an effort to win legal protection for game enthusiasts and preservationists who want to keep abandoned games alive by running multiplayer servers or eliminating authentication mechanisms.
Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose hundreds of millions of Internet users to attacks on their computers and all that they protect, and Flash objects can only be reliably accessed via closed software, and not from free/open code that anyone can inspect.
If there's anything creepier than a drone flying up to your home and peering through your window, it's the thought of your technology—your cellphone, laptop camera, car radio, or even an implanted medical device—being turned on you for an even more intimate view of your private life. But the reaction last week to a drunken government intelligence agent borrowing his buddy's drone and crashing it into the White House lawn is a reminder that shortsighted solutions to the first problem could exacerbate the second.
As the White House reacted to the drone crash with a call for more regulation, the manufacturer of the downed quadcopter announced it would push a firmware update to all its units in the field, permanently preventing those drones from taking off or flying within 25km of downtown Washington DC.
It may seem odd to say so during Copyright Week, but copyright in itself isn't very important. Sure, EFF expends a lot of time and energy arguing about copyright law, and some of our adversaries spend even more. But we don't do so because copyright has any independent value. Rather, its value is derived from its ability to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (in the words of the US Constitution), as well as to promote other important values such as the rights to freedom of expression, privacy, education, and participation in cultural life.
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