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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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:17PM
Actually, as I looked into it, I was less concerned with the poor usage of the English language than I was with the fact that this mastermind was reporting on year-old news as if it were current.
Beyond that, words have meaning. I wouldn't have quibbled with "nearly two-decades old" or even "two decades-old." Moreover, this wasn't a missive to his girlfriend, an email to his mom, or even an Op-ed piece. It purports to be journalism. When you claim to be reporting actual happenings, statements, occurrences and/or other things loosely-termed "facts," one should be held to reasonable standards.
Regardless, I'm glad I looked a little further though, as it shows that Andy Greenberg is not only a poor writer (especially for someone who's supposed to be a journalist), but has problems even determining what year it is. Or did you miss the bit where he claims that DMCA exemptions that actually went into effect a year ago [documentcloud.org], were just going into force last Friday [wired.com]?
As for what you're calling pedantry, expect more of the same from me, as required, in the future. If that means you don't read what I post, all the better, so I won't need to read your inane replies.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:23AM
Maybe he wrote it last year, and it took so long until it got published? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.