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[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of the net's most important freedom canaries died the day the W3C greenlit web-wide DRM; what can we learn from the fight?

EFF's long, hard-fought campaign at the World Wide Web Consortium over its plan to standardize a universal DRM for the web was always a longshot, but we got farther than anyone dared hope before we lost the web to corporate interests and cynical indifference in September.

We lost at the W3C, but we got farther than we had any right to, and that's because we created a powerful new tactic for fighting DRM, one that everyone needs to know about and use as we fight to save the rest of the internet -- including its extrusions into the physical world, AKA the "internet of things" -- from DRM.

People who want DRM say that they're just trying to protect their copyrights, but it's obvious to anyone who knows even a little about computer science that DRM is effectively useless for this purpose. But DRM laws allow companies to shut down (and even jail) anyone who breaks DRM for anyreason, and that means that once a company has DRM, they can decide whether and when security researchers can disclose the defects in their products; it also means they get to decide who can compete with them and how. It also means that accessibility workers and archivists can't exercise their rights without permission from corporations.

Now, when you argue about DRM, the pro-DRM side always says that all this stuff is an unfortunate side-effect of the law, and that they're really only trying to stop pirates, promise and cross my heart.

So here's what we did at the W3C: we proposed a membership rule that would allow members to use DRM law to sue anyone who infringed their copyrights -- but took away their rights to sue people who were breaking DRM for some other reason, like adapting works for people with disabilities, or investigating critical security flaws, or creating legal, innovative new businesses.

That meant that the pro-DRM side also had to explain to why they needed all these rights as well as the right to stop copyright infringement. It also meant that they had to explain how their DRM was technologically useful at stopping lawbreakers if the only thing keeping those lawbreakers from breaking it was the law -- not the technological efficacy of the DRM itself.

This was devastating. By taking copyright enforcement off the table and separating it from the so-called side-effects of DRM, we were able to shift the debate to the principled question of whether standards bodies should be in the business of giving powerful new legal rights to massive corporations like Apple and Google, Comcast and Disney, Netflix and Adobe. We made those companies address our concerns, and swept away the piracy smokescreen.

There are refinements to be made to this tactic, to be sure, but it was so effective in its first outing that it's a sure bet that we'll make those refinements and bring it out again.

I've written a long postmortem on the W3C fight and the tactical lessons from it. If you're in an organization, corporation or project that's wrestling with this question, I hope you'll find this useful.

The success of DRM at the W3C is a parable about market concentration and the precarity of the open web. Hundreds of security researchers lobbied the W3C to protect their work, UNESCO publicly condemned the extension of DRM to the web, and the many crypto-currency members of the W3C warned that using browsers for secure, high-stakes applications like moving around peoples' life-savings could only happen if browsers were subjected to the same security investigations as every other technology in our life (except DRM technologies).

There is no shortage of businesses that want to be able to control what their customers and competitors do with their products. When the US Copyright Office held hearings on DRM in 2015, they heard about DRM in medical implants and cars, farm equipment and voting machines. Companies have discovered that adding DRM to their products is the most robust way to control the marketplace, a cheap and reliable way to convert commercial preferences about who can repair, improve, and supply their products into legally enforceable rights.

The marketplace harms from this anti-competitive behavior are easy to see. For example, the aggressive use of DRM to prevent independent repair shops ends up diverting tons of e-waste to landfill or recycling, at the cost of local economies and the ability of people to get full use out of your property. A phone that you recycle instead of repairing is a phone you have to pay to replace -- and repair creates many more jobs than recycling (recycling a ton of e-waste creates 15 jobs; repairing it creates 150 jobs). Repair jobs are local, entrepreneurial jobs, because you don't need a lot of capital to start a repair shop, and your customers want to bring their gadgets to someone local for service (no one wants to send a phone to China for repairs -- let alone a car!).

But those economic harms are only the tip of the iceberg. Laws like DMCA 1201 incentivize DRM by promising the power to control competition, but DRM's worst harms are in the realm of security. When the W3C published EME, it bequeathed to the web an unauditable attack-surface in browsers used by billions of people for their most sensitive and risky applications. These browsers are also the control panels for the Internet of Things: the sensor-studded, actuating gadgets that can see us, hear us, and act on the physical world, with the power to boil, freeze, shock, concuss, or betray us in a thousand ways.

The gadgets themselves have DRM, intended to lock our repairs and third-party consumables, meaning that everything from your toaster to your car is becoming off-limits to scrutiny by independent researchers who can give you unvarnished, unbiased assessments of the security and reliability of these devices. In a competitive market, you'd expect non-DRM options to proliferate in answer to this bad behavior. After all, no customer wants DRM: no car-dealer ever sold a new GM by boasting that it was a felony for your favorite mechanic to fix it. But we don't live in an a competitive market. Laws like DMCA 1201 undermine the competition that might counter their worst effects.

DRM's dead canary: how we just lost the web, what we learned from it, and what we need to do next [Cory Doctorow/Electronic Frontier Foundation]

https://boingboing.net/2017/11/27/piracy-is-always-a-smokescreen.html

[ourmaximumcollectorwhispers-blog]

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[technato]

In Super Bowl of Startups, NFL Looks to Tackle Football Safety

The National Football League’s pitch competition features new technologies to promote athlete safety and performance

Photo: Tim Bradbury/Getty Images

In the world of tech startups, some say it’s best to “fail fast, fail often”—and it’s a mantra that WWE founder Vince McMahon might have had on his mind when he announced last week that he was bringing back the XFL. The gimmicky football league failed spectacularly when it first launched, flaming out in 2001 after only one season, and many are already predicting that McMahon’s 2020 reboot will fail again.

There are, however, nine other innovate startups on display this week, any number of which could have far more lasting impacts on the game of football. And in Minneapolis tomorrow, the day before the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles square off in Super Bowl LII, these nine companies will compete across three categories in the National Football League’s third annual “1st & Future” pitch competition, an event designed to spur new technologies that promote athlete safety and performance on the gridiron.

One winner from each category will receive a US $50,000 check from the league, two tickets to Sunday’s big game, and bragging rights for taking home what could be thought of as the “Heisman of Health-Tech.”

“There’s lots of amazing technology out there,” says Jennifer Wethe, lead neuropsychologist for the Mayo Clinic Arizona Concussion Program and one of the competition judges. But not everything is necessary impactful, novel, practical, and carries the science to back it up—all things Wethe will be looking for at Saturday’s startup showdown. “Hopefully, some of best ideas and research projects will come to the top,” she says.

The Mayo Clinic, with its flagship Minnesota hospital located fewer than 100 miles from the site of Sunday’s action, is co-sponsoring the event alongside the NFL and Comcast-NBCUniversal.

Wethe declined to pick a side in Sunday’s contest, but one startup whose founders will undoubtedly be cheering for the Pats is Exero Labs, an Ohio-based company co-created by Zoltán Meskó, a former NFL punter who played alongside New England quarterback Tom Brady in Super Bowl XLVI (which the team lost).

Illustration: Exero Labs

Exero’s impact-reduction device attaches to the front of any football helmet.

Exero makes an impact-reduction device that attaches to the front of any football helmet. It is competing in the “protective equipment” category against VyaTek Sports, an Arizona-based company also with an external energy-absorbing module, and Impressio, a University of Colorado Denver spinoff that’s developing a new kind of dissipative material involving liquid-crystal elastomers for the inside of a helmet’s lining.

Among the fledgling firms working on “new therapies to speed recovery”—category number two—are Cartilage Repair Systems, a New York company aiming to fix cartilage defects with a patient’s own cartilage-producing cells and bone marrow–derived stem cells; RecoverX, a Silicon Valley startup hoping to sell a smartphone-controlled electronic cold and heat pack; and EyeGuide, a Texas Tech University spinoff that makes a 10-second eye-tracking test for signs of mild traumatic brain injury.

Illustration: Aladdin

Aladdin is developing a headband-like device that uses a single-channel EEG with three electrodes to monitor brain waves.

“What we’re really measuring is impairment in attention,” says EyeGuide founder and Texas Tech software engineer Brian Still. As validated in a paper published last year, EyeGuide’s tool compares an athlete’s baseline ability to track a white dot moving in a figure eight with their performance after a head injury. It then determines whether someone has had a concussion—and, perhaps more importantly, through repeated testing, can advise when it’s safe for an athlete to return to play.

According to Still, the company has administered its test to more than 10,000 athletes at 30 high schools, colleges, and universities. One person who hasn’t taken it: Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, who suffered a concussion at last month’s AFC Championship Game. (And with a CEO that Still describes as “a diehard Eagles fan,” it’s unclear whether Philly-based EyeGuide would ever offer it to him anyway.)

Rounding out the 1st & Future competition are three companies vying for best “technology to improve athletic performance.” Two of these, Xensr out of Packers territory in Green Bay, Wisc., and a Canadian startup called Curv, are developing tools for sports-specific data tracking.

Illustration: Xensr

Xensr will pitch a body-worn sensor that provides custom analytics for players that are specific to their positions.

Xensr, which currently only sells products for extreme water sports, will pitch the idea of a body-worn sensor that offers specialized analytics that differ depending on whether you’re a cornerback, a tight end, or a QB. “We’re going deep into the data by position,” says founder and CEO David Troup. (“I gotta go Eagles,” he adds.)

Curv, meanwhile, has its sights set on the consumer market, aiming to supplant dedicated sports wearables with an app and web portal that, as CEO and cofounder Shea Balish explains, “turns the camera on any mobile device into a diagnostic tool for human motion.” Balish says he’ll be backing the Patriots because his great-grandfather once lived in Boston.

“But improving your performance doesn’t just mean your physical performance,” notes Craig Weiss, CEO and founder of the third company in the category, ‎Aladdin of Paradise Valley, Ariz. “Improving your sleep quality has been shown to improve your mental performance as well.”

Weiss’ startup is developing a headband-like device that uses a single-channel EEG with three electrodes to monitor brain waves. Unlike most sleep trackers, which can measure little more than motion and sound, Aladdin’s product is designed to analyze sleep-stage information to help people achieve more restorative deep-sleep.

And according to Weiss (who will be rooting for the Eagles because he’s an “NFC guy”), the same electrodes that measure brain activity can also deliver low frequencies of transcranial alternating current stimulation—small zaps that, when properly timed, have been shown to induce lucid dreaming, a semi-conscious state in which athletes can “practice” and improve motor skills in their sleep.

Steve Pecko is the cofounder and design executive of Kenzen, a San Francisco–based developer of wearable sweat analyzers and one of the winners of the inaugural Super Bowl startup competition two years ago. His advice to this year’s participants: “Really work on creating a tight narrative.”

The competition runs Saturday, 3 February, from nine-to-noon local Central time at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. NBC Sports will also carry a live-stream.

UnReal, a Boston maker of “healthy” peanut butter cups and candy-coated chocolates that counts Tom Brady as one of its investors, will not be participating.

In Super Bowl of Startups, NFL Looks to Tackle Football Safety syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com