FTC Legalizes Hacking Your Own Devices
Posted by aonenetworks On November 17, 2016
There is some big news out of the FTC recently. The agency has announced that they are relaxing the rules governing what is and isn’t allowed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As of today, you can legally hack the devices you own, including cars and TVs.
This is a huge policy shift that opens all sorts of doors that have previously been bolted shut. For starters, it means that researchers can purchase equipment and hack it to reverse engineer it. They can also probe their own equipment for security flaws and other weaknesses, which is almost certain to create a vast wave of fixes for a whole host of devices.
In the weeks ahead, you can bet that there will be dozens of new open source initiatives that will be spawned by this announcement. The implications (and the potential) is simply staggering.
This is not dissimilar to the ruling the FTC made where smartphones were concerned. Thanks to a similar rules change, users were given the ability to hack their own phones. The same basic rules apply with this new ruling, but there’s a catch.
It’s not permanent, and it may not ever be made permanent. The window is only open for a period of two years. After that, there’s no guarantee that it will remain open.
If you’ve been wishing you could reverse engineer a key piece of technology, or take it apart and probe into it without fear of a lawsuit, now is your opportunity.
This represents an enormous opportunity for business owners. If you’d like to take advantage of it, but aren’t quite sure how to proceed, give us a call. A member of our talented team would be happy to work with you to identify opportunities and demonstrate how you can make the most of this two year window of opportunity.
