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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the phone-phreaks-rejoice dept.

You may have thought that if you owned your digital devices, you were allowed to do whatever you like with them. In truth, even for possessions as personal as your car, PC, or insulin pump, you risked a lawsuit every time you reverse-engineered their software guts to dig up their security vulnerabilities—until now.

Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA's ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress's Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair.

Unfortunately, the exemptions are only temporary and will need to be re-approved the next time the Copyright Office reviews its exemptions, in 2018.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @05:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @05:19PM (#421745)

    If you are so burdened by regulation you could always move to Somalia.

  • (Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:48PM

    by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:48PM (#421785) Journal

    If you are so burdened by regulation you could always move to Somalia.

    OR, we as individuals and/or groups, could examine the foundation of USian law to determine which laws are valid and which (if any) are invalid. Pro-tip: the US Supreme Court is itself a construct of law, so trying to claim that the USSC is the font of all declarations to determine lawfulness is fallacious circular reasoning.

    1. All regulations are subservient to laws
    2. All lower laws are subservient to higher laws
    3. The highest law of USian land is the US Constitution
    4. The US Constitution itself cannot possess more authority than its source
    5. The source of authority for the US Constitution is no greater than that possessed by a single, random USian person, due to the Philadelphia Convention resting on no authority other than that which its delegates possessed, which in turn was given to them ultimately by lone individual voters whose authority does not increase in scope with numbers (illegal for 1 person to mug a stranger; still illegal for 1,000,000)

    No need for USians to move to Somalia; just start treating illegal laws and the criminals that operate under them the way they ought to be: ignore them, and if criminals confront you, deal with them as the criminals they are. (Admittedly, this approach is much easier to successfully implement the more like-minded and helpful folk are nearby. Finding such folk starts with spreading simple premises such as the one within this post.)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:15AM (#421890)

    If you're so burdened by the NSA's mass surveillance, you could always move to Somalia. Do you honestly think that's a rational response to anything? If you want to argue that the specific regulations in discussion are good, then fucking do so. Argumentation!