today's leftovers
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Licensing / Legal
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New York Times ☛ Why Tech Companies Are Not Your Friends: Lessons From Roku
This month, many of the 80 million owners of Roku devices, including streaming sticks, set-top boxes and internet-connected TVs running the company’s streaming software, turned on their Rokus to see a block of text. I, the owner of a cheap Roku TV in my bedroom, was among those who got stuck with the screen.
The message gave updated terms of service that made it harder for customers to take legal action against the company. Unless they agreed, users were blocked from access to the Roku menu and apps, essentially bricking their devices. The only way to opt out was to mail a letter to the company.
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[Old] OS News ☛ Richard Stallman Was Right All Along
“Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks,” Doctorow warns, “And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on without them.”
This is why you should support Android (not Google, but Android), even if you prefer the iPhone. This is why you should support Linux, even if you use Windows. This is why you should support Apache, even if you run IIS. There’s going to be a point where being Free/open is no longer a fun perk, but a necessity.
And that point is approaching fast.
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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The Register UK ☛ Millions of hotel room locks vulnerable to cheap-kit exploit
It would also require the intruders to reverse engineer the software used by hotel front desk staff to reprogram keycards to locks. Hotels that use these locks, of which there are more than 13,000 around the world, typically use System 6000 or Ambience for the management of keycards, researchers said.
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Futurism ☛ Android Phones Can Open Almost Any Hotel Room Door, Hackers Say
As the white-hat hacking team learned, Dormakaba's Saflok keycard lock system, which is installed in a whopping three million hotel rooms in 131 countries around the world, could easily be exploited with an inexpensive RFID read-write device. Install the code gleaned from any used keycard onto two separate ones — one to rewrite a given door's security code and the second to unlock it — and you can easily get in.
If you have an Android equipped with near-field community or NFC capabilities, the process is even easier. By downloading a signal-emitting app, you can use it to emit a signal that does the same thing as the two-card method.
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Security Week ☛ German Authorities Shut Down Online Marketplace for Drugs, Data and Cybercrime Services
German authorities took down the Nemesis Market, a major online marketplace for drugs, cybercrime services and stolen credit card data.
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