This week, I sat down for an hour-long interview with the Yale Privacy Lab‘s Sean O’Brien (MP3); Sean is a frequent Boing Boing contributor and I was honored that he invited me to be his guest on the very first episode of the Lab’s new podcast.
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Posts Tagged:
security
In my latest Locus column, “Demon-Haunted World,” I propose that the Internet of Cheating Things — gadgets that try to trick us into arranging our affairs to the benefit of corporate shareholders, to our own detriment — is bringing us back to the Dark Ages, when alchemists believed that the universe rearranged itself to prevent them from knowing the divine secrets of its workings.
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The CBC asked me to write an editorial for their package about Canadian identity and politics, timed with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the settler state on indigenous lands. They’ve assigned several writers to expand on themes in the Canadian national anthem, and my line was “We stand on guard for thee.”
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Mr Robot is the most successful example of a small but fast-growing genre of “techno-realist” media, where the focus is on realistic portrayals of hackers, information security, surveillance and privacy, and it represents a huge reversal on the usual portrayal of hackers and computers as convenient plot elements whose details can be finessed to meet the story’s demands, without regard to reality.
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Here’s the 32 minute video of my presentation at last month’s O’Reilly Security Conference in New York, “Security and feudalism: Own or be pwned.”
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On this just-released episode of the O’Reilly Radar podcast (MP3), I talk about EFF’s lawsuit against the US government to invalidate Section 1201 of the DMCA, which will make it legal to break DRM in order to fix security vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things devices that, today, are almost invariable insecure, and are also designed to be as privacy-invading as possible (to create “monetizable” data-streams) — a brutal combo.
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I’m keynoting the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O’Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF’s Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just filed a lawsuit that challenges the Constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, the “Digital Rights Management” provision of the law, a notoriously overbroad law that bans activities that bypass or weaken copyright access-control systems, including reconfiguring software-enabled devices (making sure your IoT light-socket will accept third-party lightbulbs; tapping into diagnostic info in your car or tractor to allow an independent party to repair it) and reporting security vulnerabilities in these devices.
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Earlier this month, I gave the afternoon keynote at the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit, and my talk was about how the people who founded the web with the idea of having an open, decentralized system ended up building a system that is increasingly monopolized by a few companies — and how we can prevent the same things from happening next time.
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I have a new op-ed in today’s Privacy Tech, the in-house organ of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about the risks to security and privacy from the World Wide Web Consortium’s DRM project, and how privacy and security pros can help protect people who discover vulnerabilities in browsers from legal aggression.
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