Researchers find mountains of sensitive data on totalled Teslas in junkyards
Teslas are incredibly data-hungry, storing massive troves of data about their owners, including videos of crashes, location history, contacts and calendar entries from paired phones, photos of the...
View ArticleMicrosoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its...
Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn't making enough money, so they're shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1. Customers will...
View ArticleAfter years of insisting that DRM in HTML wouldn't block open source...
The bitter, yearslong debate at the World Wide Web Consortium over a proposal to standardize DRM for web browsers included frequent assurances by the pro-DRM side (notably Google, whose Widevine DRM...
View ArticleCome see me at UCLA tonight and then with John Scalzi on Sunday at the LA...
Tonight, I'll be one of the participants at LA Cryptoparty and README's After Disruption event at UCLA from 7-930PM; it's a panel and workshop on "Big Tech, the future of labor, and how systems have...
View ArticleTalking Radicalized with the LA Public Library: Trump derangement syndrome,...
The LA Public Library's Daryl M interviewed me about my new book, Radicalized, specifically, about how my Trump anxiety (created, in part, by the platforms' relentless use of "engagement" tools to...
View ArticleBig Tech lobbyists and "open for business" Tories killed Ontario's...
In February, Liberal Party opposition MPP Michael Coteau introduced Right to Repair legislation after he was charged $400 to fix the cracked screen on his daughter's Samsung phone; that bill is now...
View ArticleSupreme Court greenlights Apple customers' lawsuit over App Store price-fixing
The Supreme Court has ruled on a key question in Apple Inc v Pepper, a class action suit arguing that the App Store violated antitrust law by driving up prices through the monopolistic tactic of...
View ArticleDiscovering whether your Iphone has been hacked is nearly impossible thanks...
This week, we learned that the notorious Israeli cyber-arms-dealer NSO Group had figured out how hijack your Iphone or Android phone by placing a simple Whatsapp call, an attack that would work even...
View ArticleDRM and terms-of-service have ended true ownership, turning us into "tenants...
Writing in Wired, Zeynep Tufekci (previously) echoes something I've been saying for years: that the use of Digital Rights Management technologies, along with other systems of control like Terms of...
View ArticleAmericans believe that they should own the mountains of data produced by...
Your car is basically a smartphone with wheels, and it gathers up to 25gb/hour worth of data on you and your driving habits -- everything from where you're going to how much you weigh. Cars gather...
View ArticleHow DRM has permitted Google to have an "open source" browser that is still...
A year ago, Benjamin "Mako" Hill gave a groundbreaking lecture explaining how Big Tech companies had managed to monopolize all the benefits of free software licenses, using a combination of dirty...
View ArticleAdversarial interoperability: reviving an elegant weapon from a more...
Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft's Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft...
View ArticlePaper-towel dispenser with a EULA prohibiting rival brands of paper
John Overholt from Harvard's Houghton Library spotted a paper towel dispenser whose prominent EULA prohibits refilling it with non-Tork brands of towels, with Tork vowing to "enforce its rights under...
View ArticleFelony Contempt of Business Model: Lexmark's anti-competitive legacy
In 2002, Lexmark was one of the leading printer companies in the world. A division of IBM—the original tech giant—Lexmark was also a pioneer in the now-familiar practice of locking customers in to...
View ArticleDebunking Microsoft's anti-Right-to-Repair FUD
Microsoft is no stranger to the use of "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" in the pursuit of monopolistic goals; the company perfected the tactic in the early 1990s as a way of scaring enterprise customers...
View ArticleJudge rules that EFF's DRM lawsuit can proceed!
In 2016, EFF sued the US Government on behalf of Andrew "bunnie" Huang and Matthew Green, both of whom wanted to engage in normal technological activities (auditing digital security, editing videos,...
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"IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from...
Adversarial interoperability is what happens when someone makes a new product or service that works with a dominant product or service, against the wishes of the dominant business. Though there are...
View ArticlePodcast: "IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from...
In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my essay "IBM PC Compatible": how adversarial interoperability saved PCs from monopolization, published today on EFF's Deeplinks; it's another installment in my...
View ArticleDOJ indicts man for paying AT&T employees to help him unlock millions of...
When Congress legalized phone unlocking in 2014, they added a bunch of carve-outs that let phone companies veto your attempt to unlock your phone, with the big one being that you couldn't unlock your...
View ArticlePodcast: Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle
In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my essay "Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle, published today on EFF's Deeplinks; it's another in the series of "adversarial interoperability"...
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