[OpenWrt-Devel] [FCC] dan gillmor nails why I just did what I did

[L. D. Pinney]

"Surely our government isn't insane"

LOL

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 5:52 PM, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

> From:
>
>
> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/10/15/trans_pacific_partnership_could_thwart_computer_security_research_and_tinkering.html
>
> "Surely our government isn't insane enough to thwart research designed
> to keep us safer in the emerging “Internet of Things.” Yet tell that,
> for starters, to the automobile industry, where one of the world's
> largest car makers, Volkswagen, cheated on emissions testing by
> tweaking its software. This crime against humanity—not an
> exaggeration, given the massive contribution this may have made to
> accelerating climate change—was discovered by researchers who, by good
> luck, discovered that VW's cars had been spewing vastly more
> pollutants than the company claimed for years. This almost certainly
> would have been uncovered much earlier had the industry not relied on
> the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to “protect” its software from
> analysis; the DMCA made it illegal to circumvent “digital restrictions
> management.” Yet the automakers continue to adamantly oppose any
> exception to the DMCA.
>
> This TPP provision, assuming it's in the final document—won't it be
> great when our government allows us to actually see it?—is just one of
> the many, many terrible “intellectual property” arrangements aimed at
> giving corporations greater control over their customers. When
> software is part of a product, as it is in so many things today and
> almost everything tomorrow, the very concept of ownership becomes an
> abstraction for the alleged buyer. And when we risk harsh penalties
> for even attempting to repair a device that's defective, whether
> that's because of the seller's incompetence or venality, we are in a
> totally untenable, and frighteningly insecure, position.
>
> We need to be going in precisely the opposite direction, and a
> too-little-noticed proposal this week shows how it might be done. A
> group of security experts looked into the absolutely horrifying, and
> willful, lack of security in devices most of us use every
> day—especially the Wi-Fi routers that let us share one Internet
> connection among a variety of devices—and asked the Federal
> Communications Commission to intervene.
>
> In a letter to the FCC and a press release explaining their goals,
> more than 250 people, including Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's
> creators, implored the agency to make these crucial devices more
> secure by forcing manufacturers to be more open about how they work.
> Among other things, the security experts asked the FCC to require that
> device makers a) provide public access to “source code”—the
> programming instructions that operate the device—so that it can be
> analyzed; b) provide ongoing security updates in timely ways; and c)
> be prevented from selling devices that don't comply with those and
> other rules designed to ensure security.
>
> The FCC should make this happen yesterday. Then, regulators and
> Congress should extend the compelling logic of this proposal to other
> devices—notably cars and mobile phones—that are notoriously riddled
> with flaws.
>
> Meanwhile, it's vital that Congress not agree to the TPP as it's
> currently written. Thankfully, the deal is in trouble. Let's hope the
> odd-couple combination of a corporate-dominated Obama administration
> and a Republican-controlled Congress doesn't override common sense and
> the public good."
>
> Scientists and Engineers have a mandate to obey physical law. Lawyers,
> and lobbyists, not so much.
>
> Dave Täht
> I just lost several years of my life to making wifi better. And the
> FCC wants to mess all that up. https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
> _______________________________________________
> FCC mailing list
> FCC at lists.prplfoundation.org
> http://lists.prplfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fcc
>
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