Automobiles are inherently mobile, and increasingly they contain equipment that would commonly be considered computing devices… Many of the ECUs embodied in today’s motor vehicles are carefully calibrated to satisfy federal or state regulatory requirements with respect to emissions control, fuel economy, or vehicle safety. Allowing vehicle owners to add and remove programs at whim is highly likely to take vehicles out of compliance with these requirements, rendering the operation or re-sale of the vehicle legally problematic. The decision to employ access controls to hinder unauthorized “tinkering” with these vital computer programs is necessary in order to protect the safety and security of drivers and passengers and to reduce the level of non-compliance with regulatory standards. We urge the Copyright Office to give full consideration to the impacts on critical national energy and environmental goals, as well as motor vehicle safety, in its decision on this proposed exemption. Since the record on this proposal contains no evidence regarding its applicability to or impact on motor vehicles, cars and trucks should be specifically excluded from any exemption that is recommended in this area.

To put that very simply, because you COULD do wrong or evil by modifying your car, you shouldn’t be allowed to do it; because you can kill with a hammer, you are no longer allowed to buy one; and because we made this hammer so complicated, any modification of it would make it a weapon not a hammer. Under their proposed reading of the law, you own your car but not the software that runs it. And while this is terrifying in-of-itself, it has far reaching consequences for all other devices that come with firmware preloaded. Your washing machine? Nope, you don’t own that either. Your television? Still belongs to Sony. Your microwave? I guess we’ll let you keep using it for now…

As word is spreading about this proposed change, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others are circulating a petition to add an exemption to the DMCA to allow people and independent shops to work on cars, and I encourage everyone to sign it.

The post It Could Soon Be Illegal To Work on Your Car appeared first on FactoryTwoFour.

That’s not to say that Goodman doesn’t present positive steps forward or solutions to our collective level of screwed, but the eye opening facts in Future Crimes are the anecdotes and statistics about just how naive we are about all our connected devices. Having spent his career in cybercrime for everyone from the LAPD to Interpol, Goodman certainly knows what he’s talking about. In addition to his excellent TED Talk, he has lectured around the world and even teaches at the prestigious Silicon Valley Singularity University. He knows what he’s talking about is what I’m saying here. So when he says that we are in danger of losing the race to “own” our technology, we should probably listen up.

Reading this book, you’ll see stories of technology crimes you’re familiar with (the Target data breach for example) and others honestly too horrible to make the nightly news (like the international online auctioning of child rape). It’s these kinds of distributed crimes that we now have to deal with, and our own lax attitude towards mobile and connected devices is largely at fault. Future Crimes isn’t all doom and gloom however. Not only does a reading of this book make you want to immediately drop everything and become a cybercriminal (Don’t. You will get caught.), but Goodman offers up solutions we can take as individuals, as well as collectively at the government level.

We don’t a review a lot books here on FactoryTwoFour, and I’m loathe to call Future Crimes or any other book a “must read,” but let’s just say I strongly encourage you to pick this one up and read for yourself both the hidden world we are living in, and the one we could very well inhabit if we are not careful.

The post Future Crimes are Terrifying appeared first on FactoryTwoFour.