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February 2021
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Chastity Penis Lock Company That Was Hacked Says It's Now Totally Safe To Put Your Penis Back In That Chastity Lock

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While we've covered the Internet of Broken Things for some time, where companies fail to secure the devices they sell which connect to the internet, the entire genre sort of jumped the shark in October of last year. That's when Qiui, a Chinese company, was found to have sold a penis chastity lock that communicates with an API that was wide open and sans any password protection. The end result is that users of a device that locks up their private parts could enjoy those private parts entirely at the pleasure of nefarious third parties. Qiui pushed out a fix to the API... but didn't do so for existing users, only new devices. Why? Well, the company stated that pushing it out to existing devices would again cause them to all lock up, with no override available. Understandably, there wasn't a whole lot of interest in the company's devices at that point.But fear not, target market for penis chastity locks! Qiui says it's now totally safe to use the product again!

Now, the European distributor of the chastity cage, which is called CELLMATE, wants everyone to know that it's safe to use the device after the release of a new app, which it says fixed the vulnerabilities in the API used to control it."Our product and brand (CELLMATE) has received quite a bit of negative attention because of this publication. Now, you can think 'negative publicity is also publicity,' but unfortunately it turned out completely different for the CELLMATE," Dennis Jansen, who works for Desudo, a distributor of the CELLMATE device, told Motherboard in an email, referring to our first story on the hack. "This wrongly created the image that our product could be hacked, after which the genitals of the wearer would be permanently locked up. Although such a situation was not even realistic at the time of publication (as you can read and see here), this story has made current and potential users unfairly frightened of our product. You will understand that this has had absolutely no positive effect on the attention and interest in using the CELLMATE."
A couple of things to note here. First, this whining about press coverage is roughly as tone deaf as it could possibly be. Second, while an emergency release accessible with a screwdriver may indeed by a thing, it seems not every user of the device is aware of that, given that at least one victim claims he had to use bolt cutters which left him bleeding. "It fucking hurt," he told Motherboard. Which, yeah.But perhaps most important to this story is that anyone that actually wants to see the third party pen test for the API can go pound sand. Pen Test Partners, who originally discovered and reported the flaw, was reportedly brought in to assess the third party pen test as well. Asked if they would sign off that the device was now safe to use, reps from the company basically shrugged.
The founder of Pen Test Partners, Ken Munro, and the researcher who audited the CELLMATE, Alex Lomas, both confirmed to Motherboard that they did receive the third-party assessment and that the document says the issues are now resolved. But they also said they can't confirm the results, as they have not audited the device and its app and API since last year. "I don't think I can comment more about the safety or otherwise of the product at this stage, I think people hopefully have enough information to make their own judgements," Lomas told Motherboard in an online chat.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, obviously. The point is that the reputation cost for any company that allows this kind of vulnerability doesn't normally put a company in the position of trust for these kinds of fixes. That lack of trust likely becomes supercharged when people's naughty bits are involved. What's really needed here, should the companies and their distributors want to restore trust with the public, is transparency. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be in the offering.

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posted at: 12:00am on 10-Feb-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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Why Is Congress Pushing For Locking Up More Culture?

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In a weird bit of performative nonsense, Senators Thom Tillis and Pat Leahy, along with Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Mace, have come together to... try to help kids lock up culture under copyright. Specifically, they want a bill that would allow kids to register a copyright for free for participants in the Congressional Art Competition and the Congressional App Competition. It is not at all clear why this is necessary, other than to perpetuate the myth that you need a copyright to be creative.First, to be clear, any such unique and original artwork is already covered by copyright. For better or for worse (by which I mean, for worse), the US now says that copyright is automatic from the time the work is "fixed" in a tangible medium (and if you try to point out that computer code is not a tangible medium, it gets them very, very angry, so don't bother...). So no one needs to register their copyright to be protected. Not registering does limit the ability of the copyright holder to sue or to get statutory damages. But if anyone creating works for a Congressional Art Competition is seeking to sue others, well, that seems like a bigger problem right there.But here's the key point: copyright is supposed to be there solely as an incentive for creation. The entire setup and basis for copyright in the Constitution is so that Congress can create incentives to promote the progress of science and the useful arts (and, copyright was meant for the "science" part, patents are the "useful arts"). I can pretty much assure you that no one creating artwork or apps for a Congressional competition is doing so because they're incentivized by the copyright. They're doing so because of the competition itself and the desire to express themselves (and maybe get some attention for what they've done).So encouraging locking these things up is bizarre and counterproductive. More to the point, why aren't these elected officials suggesting that the artists and developers entering these competitions explore the many Creative Commons options to help get their works more widely known?The answer, tragically, is as obvious as it is cynical. This is all driven by the legacy copyright industries who keep trying to push the myth that copyright = creation. And these are their favorite elected officials. Hollywood backed Tillis strongly in the last election, in which he was expected to lose, so he clearly owes them. Leahy has always been extremely close to Hollywood. Beyond being the Senate supporter of SOPA (his version was PIPA), Hollywood always rewards Leahy by giving him small roles in every Batman film. His daughter is also a Vice President and top lobbyist for the Motion Picture Academy, Hollywood's top lobbying body.On the House side, the legacy copyright industry has been cultivating a close relationship with Jeffries for a while now, including setting up a neat fundraiser for him in which if you just pay him (and Jerry Nadler) $5k each you get to hang out with Jeffries at the Grammies. Nice work if you can get it. Nancy Mace is new to Congress, so she may just be along for the ride here.The problem with all of this is just how cynically corrupt this seems. Even if it's in the form of "soft corruption," the connection of a few Senators and Representatives pushing a misguided line of thinking -- that completely undermines the very basis for copyright law -- in favor of the myth pushed by Hollywood and the legacy recording industry, it just makes everyone actually respect copyright even less.This isn't what copyright is for, and it's shameful that these elected officials are pushing the myth forward.

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posted at: 12:00am on 10-Feb-2021
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