• One Weird Law That Interferes With Security Research, Remix Culture, and Even Car Repair

  How can a single, ill-conceived law wreak havoc in so many ways? It prevents you from making remix videos. It blocks computer security research. It keeps those with print disabilities from reading ebooks. It makes it illegal to repair people's cars. It makes it harder to compete with tech companies by designing interoperable products. It's even been used in an attempt to block third-party ink cartridges for printers.

  It's hard to believe, but these are just some of the consequences of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives legal teeth to "access controls" (like DRM). Courts have mostly interpreted the law as abandoning the traditional limitations on copyright's scope, such as fair use, in favor of a strict regime that penalizes any bypassing of access controls (such as DRM) on a copyrighted work regardless of your noninfringing purpose, regardless of the fact that you own that copy of the work.  

• One Weird Law That Interferes With Security Research, Remix Culture, and Even Car Repair

• Spotify is Defective by Design

  I never used Spotify, since it contains DRM. Instead I still buy DRM-free CDs. Most of my audio collection is stored in free formats such as FLAC and Ogg Vorbis, or Red Book in the case of CDs, everything can be played by free players such as VLC or mpd.

  Spotify, which uses a central server, also spies on the listener. Everytime you listen a song, Spotify knows which song you have listened and when and where. By contrast free embedded operating systems such as Rockbox do not phone home. CDs can be baught anonymously and ripped using free software, there is no need for an internet commection.

The Serenity operating system turns 1 year old today. I'm counting from the first commit in the git repository, on October 10, 2018. Parts of the code had been around for a while before that, so this first commit was really about putting everything I was tinkering with into a shared repo.

• Why much of the [WWW] is closed off to blind people

  Ultimately, those pushing for digital accessibility argue that businesses have no excuse for dragging their feet over it.

  "It's not hard to do, it should just be part of best practice, not an additional line item, just like making sure a website loads quickly is," says Laura Kalbag, a website designer and author of Accessibility for Everyone.

  "It basically just involves HTML coding, which even a blogger can do. If it is a huge website, it might take some time, but the work itself is not complicated."

  She adds it is a myth that making a website accessible makes it ugly, there is no correlation - you can still have snazzy images and graphics.

• Neil Young’s Boring, Prophetic Message to Readers

  To Feel the Music is the story of Pono, which was Neil Young’s quixotic attempt to create and sell a new kind of portable music player and download service. Something that didn’t crush recorded sound into nasty little MP3s. If you’ve read either of his previous books, Waging Heavy Peace and Special Deluxe, you’ll be familiar with his preoccupation—his obsession, his foreboding—in this area. Young has long contended that with digitization, the conversion of music into data, has come a terrible shriveling of our sonic universe. You’ll also be familiar with his distinctively dazed, American Primitive prose style: “You have to give your body a chance to absorb [music] and recognize how good it feels to hear it. The human body is incredible. It’s great! It’s made by God/nature, depending on your beliefs.”

  MP3s, and I’ll try to be as scientific as I can here, are evil. They go against God/nature by chopping music into numbers. I’m with Young 100 percent on this. Beautiful flowing music, sliced to bits! And what is the devil’s price for having the entire Tangerine Dream back catalog at your fingertips? Why, shitty sound quality. The sound coming out of my Bluetooth speaker is no longer a dimension; it’s a narrow pulse, a serrated wave. Bass-blurts, ragged spikes of treble, a terrible crowdedness or crammedness in the midrange. My old-fart ears are squeaking in discomfort. The acoustic environment, like every other environment, is being degraded.

  But it doesn’t have to be, is Young’s point. We’ve all settled for this, because Steve Jobs said so. [...]

• Chrome 78 Beta: a new Houdini API, native file system access and more

  Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Find more information about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 78 is beta as of September 19, 2019.

• Chrome 78 Hits Beta With Native File System API, Much Faster WebSockets

  Google on Friday released the Chrome 78 web-browser beta following last week's release of Chrome 77.

  Chrome 78 Beta is coming with a new Houdini API or more formally known as the CSS Properties and Values API Level 1, which lets developers register variables as fully custom CSS properties and can better handle animations and other use-cases.

• Firefox 69 dropped support for <keygen>

  With version 69, firefox removed the support for the <keygen> feature to easily deploy TLS client certificates.
  It's kind of sad how used I've become to firefox giving me less and less reasons to use it...

• [Mozilla] Restricting third-party iframe widgets using the sandbox attribute, referrer policy and feature policy

  Adding third-party embedded widgets on a website is a common but potentially dangerous practice. Thankfully, the web platform offers a few controls that can help mitigate the risks. While this post uses the example of an embedded SurveyMonkey survey, the principles can be used for all kinds of other widgets.

  Note that this is by no means an endorsement of SurveyMonkey's proprietary service. If you are looking for a survey product, you should consider a free and open source alternative like LimeSurvey.