I was initially happy about this until I saw that the primary reason was the VW scandal. Why are our laws only ever put into check when a controversy like this breaks out? We have to wait for the really bad abuses before anyone ever dials back the bullshit.
EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. This is a great reminder why we should all donate to EFF [and that I haven't renewed my membership since a few months ago] Edit: membership now renewed
Also, if you shop at Amazon, use smile.amazon.com for purchases, after hooking it up to EFF. It's the "Give % of sales to non-profit of your choice" option in Amazon.
Or Project Smile. I realize this has nothing to do with the EFF, it's just a project that should get a lot more press and support.
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#33It should be noted that this is a very limited ruling. Only the owner can modify the car, and you can't go to a mechanic or third party to modify it (or inspect it), which will greatly restrict the application.
Also this doesn't apply to Entertainment or Telemetrics portions. So your car could be straight up spying on you, or your manufacturer can leave unpatched security holes in your "Entertainment" system (which has already been used ( http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/syst...) to remotely hack your car), and there is nothing you can legally do. You can't even deeply look into the system to find such vulnerabilities.
I mean a win is a win, but this isn't as big as one would hope.
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just the same old issue of DRM as before: create a system that works when the user is running it like they're supposed to, but doesn't reveal anything when they're not. And it's never worked. Probably can never work. Cory Doctorow talks about it in his talks on eliminating DRM. Basically, at the end of the day, the only real means we have of making DRM "work" is using laws (which, of course, doesn't stop crim…
It worked pretty well for DirecTV, which is a more analogous scenario than normal computer software.
>It worked pretty well for DirecTV
You're going to have to explain what you mean by that, is there some story of DirecTV successfully preventing people from analyzing firmware?
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#35When will DMCA-1201 be repealed for good? This unconstitutional garbage should be abolished.
An interesting read on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20120220014712/http://www.macfer...
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#36They also got an exemption for modifying of abandoned games whose activation systems are long since gone, as well as extending/clarifying the jailbreaking exemption.
I actually worked on this part of the exemption. It was granted in two parts. First, fans may now reverse engineer and host servers for games that are no longer hosted online. Metal Gear Solid 4 is a perfect example, but there are plenty of others. This is now legal, and considered fair use. MMO's are exempted, and defined as games where the world is persistent reguardless of number of players connected (IE, is the game played in rounds, or is state reset in the world often... more than once a month, for example). It was a crude way to define the differences, but MMO's were a sticking point, so we have to come back to them later.
Second, museums and archives are now permitted to circumvent copy protection in the pursuit of preservation. This means that huge stores of old games that are otherwise unavailable are now legally preservable by institutions like Stanford, The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, and Archive.org. Of note is the fact that the Atari ST catalog of software was preserved on pirate disks, and we've yet to find any other way to save some of those pieces of software, aside from just preserving the pirate disks. This does not mean these titles can be redistributed, only that they can be modified for the sake of preservation.
Additionally, this means museums can preserve devices that circumvent copy protection, such as floppy-to-SNES devices, which we have a few of at the MADE. Modded XBoxes can now also be preserved in an institution.
The bits that help museums means a great deal for preservation of digital assets as a whole. This was a lot of work to get done, so a huge thanks goes out to the EFF, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Archive.org for all their hard work to get this done!
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It worked pretty well for DirecTV, which is a more analogous scenario than normal computer software.
>It worked pretty well for DirecTV You're going to have to explain what you mean by that, is there some story of DirecTV successfully preventing people from analyzing firmware?
Yes, famously. Google "DirecTV black sunday". DirecTV successfully killed off the (huge) DirecTV piracy community, not just by frying the old hacked cards, but by deploying new cards that have mostly withstood more than a decade of intense analysis.
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#38While I agree with the premise of all of this, when it comes to modifying car software, who now maintains the liability? If a hobbyist were to modify something incorrectly and cause a malfunction of the car which in turn injured another, or damaged property, who is liable? Surely it cannot be the automaker, they did not intend for that. Insurance companies are going to fight it, maintaining that unauthorized changes…
Insurance policies already cover this as "after-market modifications" (the terminology I've generally seen used already). There really is no cause for concern; things that used to be purely mechanical are now electric. Any modifications made mechanically before could be equally disastrous. Yes, software modifications are easier to hide, but that it is a price worth paying for the greater general freedom of everyone.
> Yes, software modifications are easier to hide
Not if you hash the software and find its been adjusted. In that sense it is easier to detect.
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright works in mysterious ways...
This is the sixth time this has process has taken place in its current form -- it's not exactly something new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
I thought you where going with a Matrix joke for a second there.
Re: EFF Wins Petition to Inspect and Modify Car Software
#40> EFF also won an exemption for users who want to play video games after the publisher cuts off support. For example, some players may need to modify an old video game so it doesn’t perform a check with an authentication server that has since been shut down
I think this is the real story for many HN readers.