#Competency management software

[skills-analytics-solutions]

Skills gap analysis can provide you with a competitive advantage in the market and enable you to stay ahead.

[gyrussystemslms]

Know The Top 5 Benefits Of Competency Management Software

LMS is a powerful competency management software that can fulfill these dynamic demands. This technology proves to be a valuable investment for the organizations that have to keep up with the progressing industry.

Visit website to Read More!

[kahunamanagementskillssystem]

What Is Skills Management?

Employee skills and competencies are top of mind for every CEO, organizational leader, analyst, and thought leader. The landscape of work is changing for many industries because of fast-paced technological advancements, evolving work environments, and shifting business goals. Top leaders are leveraging skills and competency management software and verified skills data to drive strategic decisions.

In this post, we’ll define skills management and explain the benefits of skills and competency management software. Paired with a thoughtful business strategy, skills management connects HR and Operations to create a more skilled, competitive workforce.

What is Skills Management & Why Does It Matter?

Skills management is the business process of identifying critical skills, assessing organizational capability, and developing your workforce. Modifications to business strategies and operating conditions make skills management a continuous cycle. At a high level, Kahuna defines this process in 4 steps:

Curate: Curate your skills and competency framework + content to reflect how operational roles are performed.

Assign: Assign your content through unlimited job roles, rather than fixed-job codes.

Assess: Use rich, multi-modal assessment methods to create validated user proficiency. Examples of assessment methods include on-the-job observations, quizzes, training, experience, and certifications. 

Develop: Apply employee skills assessment data to personalized development plans. Embed learning opportunities into each competency. Enable employees to close skills gaps right in the flow of work. This motivates employees and reduces time to revenue and productivity.

A note: We know there is a semantic debate on skills management, competency management, reskilling, and upskilling. At Kahuna, we believe if we spend our energy focusing on what the process is named, we lose sight of the tremendous results it produces. For more on this, listen to our Digital Transformation webinar on-demand.

Why is Skills Management Important?

Skills management is important to ensure your workforce skills align with your business strategy. It also helps you execute organizational goals, grow to meet future demands, and thrive in the “future of work.” This concept, which essentially means change, is being shaped by three driving forces:

Work: Can you automate or use smart machines to perform work? 

Workforce: Who can do the work and manage the continuum of talent options? 

Workplace: Where is work completed? How are workplaces shifting to accommodate new technologies?

Industry Change Drives Workforce Skills Demand

There’s no doubt these changes introduce complexities to skills in different work environments. In operations-focused industries, such as healthcare, energy, manufacturing, or field services, these skills changes drive up demand for reskilling and upskilling. Forrester reported that CEO concern for upskilling has grown tremendously, increasing from 53% in 2012 to 79% in 2019. 

With the events of the last 18 months, we predict this concern to continue rising. A McKinsey report states that nearly nine out of ten executives face current skills gaps, or expect them in the next five years. Additionally, 69% of organizations are doing more skill-building now than they did before COVID-19.

Organizations executing skills management with the right software can face these challenges head-on. Skills and competency management gives a sustainable strategy, promoting agility in the face of new threats. It moves skills from being an HR function to an organizational business function. It cultivates a conglomerate culture of learning, development, safety, quality, and execution. This is where the enduring effects of skills management occur and how organizational transformation begins at every level. For more information on bridging the gap in HR and Operations, check out this report by Josh Bersin.

Why Do I Need Skills Management?

The future of work is changing, and the changes are happening fast. When they impact your organization, how will you respond? Will your workforce be able to adopt new technologies, learn new systems, deploy to new locations, or transition to new roles?  

Equipping your company with skills management is the proactive approach in facing the future of work. It enables quick and confident responses to change. It informs upskilling, reskilling, hiring, and managing your people in line with business needs.

A skills strategy implemented with skills and competency management software enables employees, managers, and executives to view skills data from disparate systems (i.e., HRIS, LMS, Training, Scheduling, etc.) in one place. Validated data leads to informed business decisions about talent and business capability. It does this all while meeting and exceeding business goals no matter the industry circumstance.

Following Kahuna’s skills management process, you’ll use trusted skills data to inform Talent Identification – finding the right person for the right job at the right time – and Capability Planning – aligning your workforce to meet future skills demand.

Building a Skilled, Competitive Workforce

In conclusion, your workforce skills are critical to organizational success. Kahuna’s process of curate, assign, assess, and develop, combined with our skills management software, produces trusted workforce data to guide your workforce decisions today and in the future. 

Building a sound foundation for skills management ensures you have the right person in the right job and are capable of meeting current and future industry demands. Both of these are key to executing your business strategy and being successful as an organization.

[competencycloud-blog]

Competency Software is a type of enterprise software used for evaluating and managing human resources. Over the last few years, there has been a push to improve and expand these systems. If you are also searching for Competency Software then you must contact Competency Cloud.

[entegrys]

Competency Assessment Tools in Canada | Employee Assessment | Talent Analytic Tool | Performance Assessment - Entegrys

Competency 101 – Understanding Competencies & How They Can Benefit You. Each blog in this series is designed to provide a basic understanding of competencies, their benefits and the essentials of valid and defensible competency-based human resource processes.

To Know More Check Out Our Website www.entegrys.com/category/competency-101-understanding-competencies-how-they-can-benefit-you/ Check Out Our Website for More Information - www.entegrys.com/

[gyrussystemm]

Competency Management System (CMS) | Gyrus LMS

GyrusAim has a powerful competency management system that allows you to Build Employee Skills, compliance Training and Readiness, New Employee On-boarding, Leadership Development, and Certifications and Assessments.

[blogarkh]

Skills Assessment System that gives a validated, objective view of workforce capabilities and closes skills gaps. Skills Management software that increases training ROI.

[lifestyle-healthzone]

HR professionals are currently facing more challenges than at any other time in history like a global health crisis, mental health crisis, layoff, and economic downturn. Here some of the key challenges organizations need to address

[skills-analytics-solutions]

For the overall growth of an organization, it is fundamental that each member of the organization works at their maximum potential. Employers often see a gap between the performance of their organization and the potential it can reach.

[gyrussystemslms]

Deploy Competency Management Software for performance improvement and risk reduction. Because training and qualifications don't guarantee competence on the job.

[kahunamanagementskillssystem]

Management Skills Software kahunaworkforce.com

Kahuna Workforce Solutions is transforming competency management and workforce planning. Our flagship Kahuna platform helps organisations gain an objective view.

Optimizing Competency Management

Too often, business leaders and leadership teams make important decisions in an ad hoc way. In the absence of data, they rely on gut feeling and best guesses. Even when things turn out great, they don’t know why. Managing competencies provides a metrics-driven framework to make informed decisions about workforce priorities, productivity, and development.

As an enterprise initiative, Competency Management delivers powerful insights about an organization’s workforce today – and its potential to thrive in the future. But it has a lot of moving parts. Use available competency tools to optimize your program, including these:

●     Competency Model: What is a competency model? This is the framework for defining the skill and knowledge requirements of a job. It’s a collection of competencies that jointly define successful job performance. There are a variety of models to choose from. Take time to understand your options, weigh the pros and cons of each, then select and refine the model that will work best at your organization.

●     Skills Assessments: These days, most employee and manager skills assessments are conducted online, but you may do some of your skills assessments in person. However you do your assessments, be sure that there is consistency from one to the next, so you have objective results that help you better understand the current skills of your workforce.

●     Competency Management System: At scale, Competency Management programs benefit from using technology to assess, analyze, track, and manage the skills and competencies of your workforce. Without this technology system or software, there is just too much data and too many variables to manage your information adeptly and make informed decisions. There are many competency systems to choose from, including Kahuna Workforce. Think through what’s most important to you (cloud vs. on site, roots in competencies, field and process flexibility, expertise in your industry, etc.) to find a system that fits.

  Management Skills System is a collection of abilities that include things such as business planning, decision-making, problem-solving, communication, delegation, and time management. While different roles and organizations require the use of various skill sets, management skills help a professional stand out and excel no matter what their level. In top management, these skills are essential to run an organization well and achieve desired business objectives.

What are the benefits of skills management?

It's never been so easy to unlock the benefits of skills management. Skills Tracking System

Assess, track and report on skill and interest levels of all people. Quickly find skilled employees for a job, client or project.

[competencycloud-blog]

4 Things You Must Know For Selecting The Right Competency Software

More and more companies are moving towards competence-based management of their resources. 

Competency tests offer critical methodologies for assessing how an individual performs in their current position and if they align well with future job possibilities.

Whether it's in the sense of selection, efficiency or growth, there are some principal characteristics that you want to look for while selecting a right Competency Software— Here are the top 4 requisites that it must have:

Capability to assess strengths and weaknesses across the workforce

An effective tool for determining competencies would give you the opportunity to look beyond the person and instead consider the composition of your overall workforce. 

Through evaluating the strengths, limitations, and deficiencies in competencies across the enterprise – or within different departments or classes – you are in the position to make more informed choices about conducting training programs, efficiently distribute resources and align growth opportunities with organizational priorities. 

Being able to organize the common competencies of your company and tackle them consistently enables you to be more flexible and receptive to change.

Supportive of worker growth and empowerment.

As the demographic composition of the task force shifts towards an expanded proportion of millennials, it is critical for businesses to be able to provide the means and mechanisms that can sustain the requirements of this young workforce, as well as empower them to handle their careers and recognize their true potential. 

Providing easy-to-use Competency Software  to workers lets them see how they function within the company and encourage them to search for growth opportunities that support them and their organization, both.

When choosing an evaluation tool, make sure that you understand how it can be connected to your existing LMS or what expertise it can provide to help workers recognize self-directed educational possibilities and resources.

Help examine individual performance against future job possibilities.

In order to use competency evaluation for performance or growth purposes, you ought to be able to assess the achievement of an individual against a fixed metric— be it their accomplishments at the present position or potential career goals. 

Look for a  Competency Software  that allows you to compare the competencies of a person against the competency criteria of a particular job to recognize gaps—which, in turn, could be resolved through targeted learning programs, and strengths that will make that person a good match for future career advancement.

 Offers individual and aggregate reporting abilities

What people are searching for in their own personal evaluation report is likely to be different from what supervisors or managers might be expecting in a review process. 

Look for the tools that accurately define and report the personal strengths and opportunities for growth from the viewpoint of the individual. This will provide more reliable information in an Excel format that can be exported and allows you the freedom to customize the data to match your unique organizational requirements.

[blubberquark]

Computer Literacy

Computer literacy is the most important social problem of today. At least, it’s the most important problem relative to the amount of time we spend talking about it. That makes it the most underrated social problem, and probably the one where we can achieve the most long-term improvements per unit of effort spent, but for some reason we don’t.

As computers have become more and more important, most jobs are now impossible to do without some sort of IT system in there, and that has resulted in people who used to be competent, confident and creative in their jobs throwing their hands in the air, saying “it’s a software problem, what can you do“ as automation increasingly dictates their workflows and makes them unable to even do things they used to be able to accomplish manually.

Somehow, the modern world is full of computers, and they are more important than ever, but as software has become more complicated and more difficult to use, people have become worse at using computers.

Over the last twenty years, we didn’t really get better at computer use. Instead we got used to not being able to understand what’s going on. We are also used to not being in control. Programs update themselves. Web apps change their UI. Web sites change their URL structure and invalidate all your bookmarks. Phones become obsolete in a way that makes it impossible to even run the versions of apps that used to work.

When I talk about complexity, I don’t mean the “internal” complexity of software, as in code complexity, build dependencies, software architecture, and all the tooling to manage this somehow. I mean user-visible complexity: Software is no longer an .exe file on your hard drive, but a self-updating app with a small icon that needs an online account and starts itself when your computer starts. Data is no longer a file on a floppy disk, but a collection of rows in an SQL database somewhere in %APPDATA%, or worse, a collection of rows in an SQL database in the cloud behind a REST API that is actually not REST but just RPC over HTTP.

Computer literacy is a moving target. That makes it difficult to teach. I suspect that the software industry wants it that way.

In their quest to “simplify“ software, vendors turn every application into a black box or a walled garden, denying users ways to re-use knowledge gained from other apps. Can you share the document you are editing with your friends by sharing the URL in your browser? If it was a file, you could save it and share the file with a friend. Online, all bets are off. Maybe the URL thing works, maybe the application has its own internal sharing system that requires your friends to make accounts, so you can “connect“ with them, and only then can you select them from a drop-down menu to share your document with, or maybe the application automatically scrapes your friends from facebook.

When I was in 7th grade, I had “basic computer lessons“, sponsored by Microsoft. We learned how many bits there were in a byte, how to send e-mail with hotmail.com, and what to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for. What we did not learn was how to uninstall software, how to burn a CD, or how to send e-mail attachments. The “child-proofing” software installed on the school computers prevented us from accessing the file system.

Important tasks such as

connecting to a wireless network

printing on a shared network printer

getting your PowerPoint to display on an external screen or projector

verifying that an e-mail is indeed coming from your friend or your bank

were left out.

(Aside: Why don’t banks sign their mail with PGP?)

In the mean time, what has gotten worse was not education. It was software itself. Software has gotten more and more hostile to computer literacy. Some software is actively hostile to deep understanding now, and increasingly it’s also becoming hostile to shallow understanding and muscle memory. Good luck with your new iPad air, we have moved all the buttons around, and have hidden basic functionality behind gestures. Tapping this does nothing, maybe try swiping it, pinching it, shaking it, with three fingers, swipe from the edge of the screen, whoops you switched apps now. It’s no longer possible for an end user to understand software. It’s no longer possible for third parties to even write “the missing handbook” of Slack or Google Docs or Spotify or Dropbox or indeed the iPad. It will be obsolete before it hits the shelves.

Related: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/

[entegrys]

Competency Consulting | Performance Assessment | Assessment Tools in Canada - Entegrys

Job postings site them. Human resource professionals talk about them. But what exactly are competencies—just the current vernacular for knowledge and skills or personality traits?

In a word—simplification! Competencies give us objective language to move from what are often unclear, unfocused and challenging performance reviews to positive, productive development discussions. They also offer us the reliability and ease of measuring actual on-the-job results rather than trying to predict desired results from information available through traditional sources.

To Know More Check Out Our Website www.entegrys.com/2018/08/01/whats-big-deal-competencies/ Check Out Our Website for More Information www.entegrys.com/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The urinary tract infection business-model

There were two competing visions at the dawn of the modern digital era: in one camp, you had people who saw computers as a way to empower people to push back against corporate and state control; in the other camp, there were the people who wanted to use computers to transfer power from the public to corporations or governments.

I’ve always been baffled by the technologists who pursued control over liberation: surely their own formative experiences were of the liberatory power of technology. After experiencing that power, how could these Vichy nerds lend their skills to the project of forging digital shackles?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/12/redeeming-hackers/#origin-stories

And yet, there they were, from the earliest days. Back in 2017, Redditor /u/vadermeer was browsing a Seattle thrift-shop and unearthed a trove of early internal documents from Apple’s SSAFE project, an early, doomed DRM project from 1979:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/5vjsow/found_internal_apple_memos_about_copy_protection/

The files (now hosted at the Internet Archive) are a chronicle of the battle between technologists pursuing user liberation and technologists who want to use computers to control their users. There are some great cameos from Woz:

https://archive.org/details/AppleSSAFEProject

SSAFE bombed, but the fight raged on for decades and rages on still. I’ve been in the thick of it for more than 20 years — literally. My first day on the job for EFF, back in 2002, was spent attending the inaugural meeting of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), an inter-industry conspiracy to put all computers in chains, forever:

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-i-3395769891b0

The BPDG’s mission was to create a standard for a Broadcast Flag a single bit that would be included in the headers for video files. If the flag was present, any device that encountered the video would have to restrict its playback, checking to see whether and under what circumstances that playback could occur.

In order to make this work, the group — an alliance of giant corporations from consumer electronics, IT, broadcast/cable/satellite and movies — would get a friendly lawmaker (Billy Tauzin, one of the dirtiest Congressmen who ever held office) to pass a law that required anyone building a video-capable device to seek out and respond to the flag.

As part of this proposal, all video-capable devices would also need to be “resistant to end-user modification” — that is, they’d have to have enough Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to trigger Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which banned removing copyright locks on penalty of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

Strip away all the acronyms and obfuscation and here’s what that meant: if this group got their way, every computer would only run proprietary software (no free software/open source allowed) and if you tried to reverse-engineer it to change it to do your bidding in any way, you could be sent to prison for five years.

Under this system, whatever restrictions the manufacturer imposed on the use of their computer-enabled products would be the final word. It would be a felony for a rival to make a tool that plugged into their system and let you do stuff the manufacturers blocked, even if that stuff was perfectly legal.

For example, under this system, distributing ad-blockers would be a felony. If the manufacturer designed a computer — any computer, whether or not it was used to watch video, because the standard was video-capable not video-intended — so that the browser used the operating-system’s DRM to prevent ad-blocking, bypassing it would be a crime.

At the time, we warned that giving manufacturers the power to restrict how you configured your own digital products would lead them to abuse that power — not to prevent copyright infringement, but to shift value from you to them. The temptation would be too great to resist, especially if the companies knew they could use the law to destroy any company that fixed the anti-features in their products.

Sometimes, this was dismissed as fearmongering, with company insiders insisting that they knew their colleagues to be good and honorable people who wouldn’t ever abuse this power. I expected that: no one is the villain of their own story, and we are all prone to inflated assessments of our power to resist moral hazard.

But there was another response to our activism, one that was far more telling: “Yes, we are going to take away all the features you get with your digital media and sell them back to you one click at a time. So what?”

These people were in thrall to a specific ideology: the neoliberal doctrine that markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources, and anything that isn’t a market can be improved by turning it into one.

That’s the brain-worms that leads “entrepreneurs” to flood the entire IRS switchboard with thousands of auto-dialers and then auction off the right to be bridged into a call when someone picks up:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

It’s the same species of brain-worms that causes “entrepreneurs” to make apps that let people vacating a public parking spot to sell off the right to park there next:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/23/5836232/san-francisco-is-going-after-apps-that-let-people-sell-their-public-parking-spots

It’s the same species of brain-worms that causes “entrepreneurs” to make fake bookings for every hot table at every restaurant in town and then auction off the right to dine:

https://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-person-in-san-francisco-for-a-day/

In the case of digital media, these brain-worms manifested as the certainty that we get too many rights when we buy or subscribe to digital media. The argument goes:

When you buy a book or movie or song or game, you may not want the right to sell it on the used market, or give it away, or re-read or re-watch or re-listen to it;

Because the only way to get media is to buy it outright, you might be paying more than you need to for that media;

Perhaps the seller would offer you a discount on a book you could only read once, or Christmas movie you could only watch in July;

The blunt instrument of sale means that there are lots of discount offers that never get made, so there are lots of people with less money to spend who are excluded from the market.

Put that way, it sounds reasonable, and indeed, in the margins, there have been some successes from the ability to transform an unconditional sale to a conditional license. You can “buy” a streaming movie on Youtube for $10, or “rent” it for $3; and you can pay $10/month for ad-free Spotify, $5/month for Spotify with some ads, or $0/month for ad-heavy Spotify.

But these are exceptions. Most of the pre-digital offers aren’t available at any price: you could buy a DVD and keep it forever, even if you never went back to the store again. If you “buy” a video on Prime or YouTube and then cancel your subscription and delete your account, you lose your “purchase.”

If you buy a print book, you can lend it out or give it away to a friend or a library or a school. Ebooks come with contractual prohibitions on resale, and whether an ebook can be loaned is at the mercy of publishers, and not a feature you can give up in exchange for a discount.

For brain-wormed market trufans, the digital media dream was our nightmare. It was something I called “the urinary tract infection business model.” With non-DRM media, all the value flowed in a healthy gush: you could buy a CD, rip it to your computer, use it as a ringtone or as an alarmtone, play it in any country on any day forever.

With DRM, all that value would dwindle from a steady stream to a burning, painful dribble: every feature would have a price-tag, and every time you pressed a button on your remote, a few cents would be deducted from your bank-account (“Mute feature: $0.01/minute”).

Of course, there was no market for the right to buy a book but not the right to loan that book to someone else. Instead, giving sellers the power to unilaterally confiscate the value that we would otherwise get with our purchases led them to do so, selling us less for more.

The Broadcast Flag was actually adopted by then-FCC chairman Michal Powell, so we sued him, along with our allies at Public Knowledge and the American Library Association, and kicked his ass, and the Broadcast Flag died in 2005:

https://www.eff.org/cases/ala-v-fcc

But the dream of the Broadcast Flag never died. All the streaming apps on your phone come with the same restrictions that the Broadcast Flag would have imposed on over-the-air videos.

It’s much worse on your big screen. Your cable receiver is a gigantic, energy-sucking, wallet-draining piece of shit; the average US household spends $200 on these clunky, insecure devices, and every attempt to “unlock the box” has been thwarted by Hollywood and the Copyright Office:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/newly-released-documents-show-hollywood-influenced-copyright-offices-comments-set

The UTI business-model didn’t take hold in most markets, but it’s alive and well in your cable box. That box is mandatory, and modifying it runs afoul of DMCA 1201, meaning you can go to prison for five years for helping someone unfuck their cable box.

Back when PVRs like Tivo entered the market, viewers were as excited about being able to skip ads as broadcasters and cable operators were furious about it. The industry has treated ignoring or skipping ads as a form of theft since the invention of the first TV remote control, which was condemned as a tool of piracy, since it enabled viewers to easily change the channel when ads came on.

The advent of digital TV meant that cable boxes could implement DRM, ban ad-skipping, and criminalize the act of making a cable box that restored the feature. But early cable boxes didn’t ban ad-skipping, because the cable industry knew that people would be slow to switch to digital TV if they lost this beloved feature.

Instead, the power to block ads was a sleeper agent, a Manchurian Candidate that lurked in your cable box until the cable operators decided you were sufficiently invested in their products that they could take away this feature.

This week, Sky UK started warning people who pressed the skip-ad button on their cable remotes that they would be billed an extra £5/month if they fast-forwarded past an ad. The UTI business model is back, baby — feel the burn!

https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/sky-warns-customers-charged-5-25644831

This was the utterly foreseeable consequence of giving vendors the power to change how their devices worked after they sold it to you, under conditions that criminalized rivals who made products to change them back.

Back in 2004, Wired published a special edition featuring reviews of new digital AV technology, almost all of which was encumbered with DRM. I had worked as a Wired reviewer on and off for years at that point, and I published a blog post taking the magazine to task for failing to note that all the features that it was praising in these devices could be taken away by the manufacturer at any time:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/28/bittorrent-write-up-in-wired/

Then editor-in-chief Chris Anderson defended the move, saying that DRM would encourage rightsholders to make their media available, and this was a net benefit:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied, saying this wasn’t the point: if you’re a trusted reviewer and you’re telling readers, “Buy this device because it has these three excellent features,” you have a duty to warn them that any of these features could be taken away due to factors beyond your control, leaving you without any recourse:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

This is a case I’ve made to other reviewers since, but no one’s taken me up on my suggestion that every review of every DRM-enabled device come with a bold warning that whatever you’re buying this for might be taken away at any time. In my opinion, this is a major omission on the part of otherwise excellent, trusted reviewers like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter.

Everywhere we find DRM, we find fuckery. Even if your cable box could be redesigned to stop spying on you, you’d still have to root out spyware on your TV. Companies like Vizio have crammed so much spyware into your “smart” TV that they now make more money spying on you than they do selling you the set.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/still-the-product/#vizio

Remember that the next time someone spouts the lazy maxim that “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.” The problem with Vizio’s TVs isn’t that they’re “smart.” The problem isn’t that you’re not paying enough for them.

The problem is that it’s illegal to unfuck them, because Vizio includes the mandatory DRM that rightsholders insist on, and then hide surveillance behind its legal minefield.

The risks of DRM aren’t limited to having your bank-account drained or having your privacy invaded. DRM also lets companies decide who can fix their devices: a manufacturer that embeds processors in its replacement parts can require an unlock code before the device recognizes a new part. They can (and do) restrict the ability of independent service depots to generate these codes, meaning that manufacturers get a monopoly over who can fix your ventilator, your tractor, your phone, your wheelchair or your car.

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

The technical term for these unlock codes is “VIN-locking,” and the “VIN” stands for “vehicle identification number,” the unique code etched into the chassis of every new car and, these days, burned into into its central computerized controller. Big Car invented VIN-locking.

VIN-locking is the major impediment to securing the Right to Repair. Manufacturers of all kinds bootstrap the DMCA — a Clinton-era copyright law — into a new doctrine that Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model.” Removing DRM is illegal, so any business model that hides behind DRM is illegal to thwart:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model-1464231071e

With Felony Contempt of Business Model, repair is just the tip of the iceberg. When security experts conduct security audits of DRM-locked devices, they typically have to bypass the DRM to test the device.

Since bypassing this DRM exposes them to legal risks, many security experts simply avoid DRM-locked gadgets. Even if they are brave enough to delve into DRM’s dirty secrets, their general counsels often prohibit them from going public with their results.

This means that every DRM-restricted device is a potential reservoir of long-lived digital vulnerabilities that bad guys can discover and exploit over long timescales, while honest security researchers are scared off of discovering and reporting these bugs.

That’s why, when a researcher goes public with a really bad security defect that has been present for a very long time, the system in question often has DRM — and it’s why media devices are so insecure, because they all have DRM.

But these days, “media device” has ceased to be a meaningful category. As we warned Chairman Powell in 2003, soon every device would have a general purpose computer inside it, and any rule regulating “media devices” would regulate everything.

Cars are media devices. Many new cars sell with Sirius XM players built into their media centers (mine did, and I was bombarded with calls and letters from Sirius begging me to subscribe to it). These players have DRM. They also have incredibly grave security defects.

Security researcher Sam Curry and his colleagues discovered that they could hijack Sirius XM-enabled cars, armed only with the VIN number that was printed on its windscreen. Sirius’s authentication sucks and once you authenticate to an in-car Sirius-enabled app, you’re in:

https://gizmodo.com/sirius-xm-bug-honda-nissan-acura-hack-1849836987

Curry and pals were able to plunder personal information from connected cars, lock and unlock them, and execute other commands available through the cars’ telematics systems. A similar hack of Jeep cars in 2017 let attackers seize control over steering, brakes and accelleration:

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

The auto industry itself admits that its products gather so much information on you — the contents of your phone, the places you go — that any breach could endanger your very life. Indeed, they made this claim to try to scare Massachusetts voters away from passing Right to Repair legislation in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The same structural factors that make cars dumpster-fires of slapdash security are also present in your phone, and, thanks to the 2017 decision to standardize DRM in browsers, in your browser:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This all starts with the idea that the problem with “content” is that Congress gave us, the public, too many rights under copyright, and that nickel-and-diming us to buy those rights a la carte would fix this problem. 20 years later, the benefits of this system are thin gruel indeed, and the costs keep mounting.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A wood-paneled living room with a large flat screen TV on a stand. Before the TV sit two small boys with their arms around each others' shoulders, sitting crosslegged on the carpet in front of the set. The screen of the set displays a giant arcade machine '25¢ Push to Reject' coin-slot. Above the set, the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey oversees the scene, ringed with a burned circle.]