Guest post by For months, privacy advocates have asked Congress to kill or reform the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a bill that they say hides new government surveillance mechanisms in the guise of security protections. Now the Senate has shot down a series of attempts to change the legislation’s most controversial measures, and then passed it with those privacy-invasive features fully intact.
The new rules for exemptions to copyright’s DRM-circumvention laws were issued today, and the Librarian of Congress has granted much of what EFF asked for over the course of months of extensive briefs and hearings. The exemptions we requested – ripping DVDs and Blurays for making fair use remixes and analysis; preserving video games and running multiplayer servers after publishers have abandoned them; jailbreaking cell phones, tablets, and other portable computing devices to run third party software; and security research and modification and repairs on cars – have each been accepted, subject to some important caveats.
It’s weird that they first made jailbreaking legal, revoked it, and then made it legal again. It’s like they can’t make up their minds. Or perhaps whoever bought that law in the first place forgot to renew their payment?
The summary isn’t very good.
Because as I understood it:
You could already jailbreak phones, you can now also jailbreak tablets.
Edited 2015-11-05 07:25 UTC
The exemption for jailbreaking was never revoked, but it would have been because (as the article states) “Every exemption must be argued anew, even if it was previously granted, and even if there is no opposition”
So not only can you thank the EFF for keeping this exemption, you can also thank them for expanding it to tablets.
Only this idiotic country could have come up with that. Seriously.
subject to some important caveats.
I believe that this is most important part of the second statement.
The 1st link to the bad news got fumbled. It should point here: http://www.wired.com/2015/10/cisa-cybersecurity-information-sharing…
…Much Bigger and Badder
than the so called good news..!
Which while welcomed is, comparatively, fluff – I hate to say..
Yeah, agreed. It’s as if they’re saying “okay, we’ll toss you this small bone while we shove the bigger one up your…” well, you get the idea.