DRM needs to protect people other than the rights holders

I'm all for people being able to protect the content they've created from being abused, but DRM

(Digital Rights Management) is frequently used for less noble purposes.  I'll go into this in this week's Wednesday post.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and partcularly its director Tim Berners-Lee (yes, that Tim Berners-Lee) recently decided to ignore numerous objections by W3C members and the internet-using public in general to go ahead with its plan to incorporate DRM into the web's body of standards.

There are numerous problems which I'll talk about tomorrow (or you can read the text of the EFF's apppeal against the decision here).  For now, read the EFF's appeal to get a sense of who and what we're fighting.

Creators deserve protection but publishers shouldn't get to decide how consumers use the content they've bought or how resarchers investigate the security of DRM systems or which innovations are allowed to succeed. This is the battleground. I'll write more about it tomorrow.

Breaking encryption

Breaking encryption is a really bad idea. There's no such thing as a back door that 'good' people (such as governments) can use and bad people such as criminals can not. This doesn't prevent virtually every government from pledging to force technology companies to implement encryption back doors in the false name of security against terrorist attacks. This won't work because terrorists do not have much incentive to obey the law. This rather reminds me of the little green visa forms you had to fill in when flying to the US. You had to tick a box to say you hadn't committed any genocides as though lying on the visa form was the greater offense.

Australia's government is the latest to adopt this pre-beaten dead horse of a stupid idea. They're copying the UK, which makes me feel guilty. I feel I must apologise for the conduct of our nation. Sorry, Australia.

The article I quoted goes over the usual stuff but I found the following amusing (emphasis mine):

But some experts, as well as Facebook, warned that weakening end-to-end encryption services so that police could eavesdrop would leave communications vulnerable to hackers.

The quote from Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is exactly as terrifying as it is hilarious:

The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.

I look forward to the anti-gravity bill. 

Relaunch

Absolutely not what this blog was named after.

Welcome to the relaunched evilwednesday. There will be a few changes around here.

The biggest change is that I'll be posting more often and more briefly. I'll try to limit myself to a few sentences on each post unless I don't. It is my blog :) I'll also write some commentary every Wednesday about various topical things. That's generally where I'll be more expansive.

As always the topics will relate to privacy and open rights. Other topics I'm interested in such as human rights, social justice, atheism, skepticism, cats will appear on another blog (URL to follow when I've decided where to put it) and those posts will be cross-linked here without comment so you can more easily ignore them.

Finally, I'll be trying to publicise this content more widely and generate some interest in privacy/open rights activism.

If you have anything to contribute, the comments are your playground.