Most Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) debates pass unnoticed, because they're very dry and detailed. However, a suggestion that the HTTP 2.0 specification might mandate encryption – in a post-Snowden world – is too tasty an idea to go under the radar.
A U.S. email provider can promise its users all the security and privacy it wants; it still has to do whatever it takes to give the government access.
That’s the gist of the Justice Department’s 60-page appellate brief in the Lavabit surveillance case, filed today in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.
Microsoft has confirmed to SCMagazineUK.com that it is considering encrypting customers' personal data which it sends over the internet, in the wake of the allegations of mass electronic surveillance by the NSA.
The revelation that Microsoft is “evaluating additional changes that may be beneficial to further protect our customers' data” came after its EMEA vice president of legal and corporate affairs, Dorothee Belz, faced tough questioning on Monday from a Committee of European MEPs.
A unique effort to crowdsource a security audit of the popular TrueCrypt open source encryption software appears to be going viral three weeks after it was launched by two U.S. based researchers in response to concerns that the National Security Agency may have tampered with it.
The intiative has so far garnered more than $57,000 in donations and bitcoins and attracted over 1,000 volunteers from 30 countries, including a techncial advisory group comprised of some of the world's best regarded cryptographers.
Google has started to encrypt its traffic between its data centers, effectively halting the broad surveillance of its inner workings by the joint National Security Agency-GCHQ program known as MUSCULAR. The move turns off a giant source of information to the two agencies, which at one point accounted for nearly a third of the NSA's daily data intake for its primary intelligence analysis database—at least for now.
Is TrueCrypt audited yet? Nope, but it will be soon. One of the world's most-used file encryption tools is about to get a full exam that will hopefully give the software a clean bill of health, after an independent effort successfully raised tens of thousands of dollars to peer into TrueCrypt's deepest recesses.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who created the world wide web, has called for a "full and frank public debate" over internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, warning that the system of checks and balances to oversee the agencies has failed.
As the inventor of the global system of inter-connectivity known as the web, with its now ubiquitous www and http, Berners-Lee is uniquely qualified to comment on the internet spying revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In August of this year, Ladar Levison shut down his email service, Lavabit, in an attempt to avoid complying with a US government request for his users’ emails. To defy the US government’s gag order and shut down his service took great courage, and I believe that Ladar deserves our support in his legal defense of that decision.
The federal institute that sets national standards for how government, private citizens and business guard the privacy of their files and communications is reviewing all of its previous recommendations.
We've already seen, and in some cases theorized, the kind of legal issues 3D printing weapons and copyrighted content can create. For example, the 3D-printed gun dubbed the Liberator was downloaded more than 100,000 times in its file form before the US State Department yanked it from the internet last spring.
