Privacy Blog

"Friends don’t let friends get spied on.' – Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and longtime advocate of privacy in technology.

Encryption

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Edward Snowden said: ‘Without Encryption, We Will Lose All Privacy. This is Our New Battleground’

This statement clearly states why encryption is important to everyone, private citizens, public officials, sports figures, celebrities, and everyone else alike: “… in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine […]

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Facebook Will Have to Give UK Police Access to Encrypted Messages, According to a Bloomberg Report

Facebook and its messaging tool WhatsApp will have to give UK police access to users’ encrypted messages under an upcoming treaty with the US, says a Saturday report by Bloomberg, which cites a confidential source. The treaty, which covers other US-based social media platforms as well, would require the sharing in regard to investigations of serious crimes, such as terrorism and pedophilia, Bloomberg said. For some time, law enforcement officials […]

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Russians Hack FBI Communications System

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies want to have “backdoors” installed in all encrypted files and messages online. That is so the law enforcement agencies can spy on everyone and (hopefully) identify criminals. Of course, if this happens, everyone will depend upon the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to keep the information they find secret and safe from hackers, foreign governments, and other evil-doers world wide. That seems […]

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IBM team is Building Encryption Methods that will be Safe from Quantum Computing

With computing power increasing faster than ever before, it’s possible to crack previously secure encryption, and with the advent of quantum computing, that possibility gets ever closer. (See https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/quantum-of-encryption-1707.html for the details.) However, a collaborative effort among computer scientists and academics to safeguard data is winning attention. The goal is to create encryption methodologies that cannot be broken by quantum computing. Details may be found in an article by Nancy […]

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The Myth of Consumer-Grade Security

From an article by security expert Bruce Schneier: The Department of Justice wants access to encrypted consumer devices but promises not to infiltrate business products or affect critical infrastructure. Yet that’s not possible, because there is no longer any difference between those categories of devices. Consumer devices are critical infrastructure. They affect national security. And it would be foolish to weaken them, even at the request of law enforcement. The […]

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Chinese Agencies ‘Crack Telegram’

If you are using Telegram, the supposedly secure messaging platform, you might want to read an article by Zak Doffman in the Forbes web site. It seems that Chinese authorities have managed to decode cell phone numbers from the (poorly) encrypted Telegram text messages and can at least see who is sending and receiving text messages. This is obviously a huge problem for those Telegram users who are using the […]

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A Quote about the Lack of Privacy in Encryption Back Doors

  “There is no such thing as a back door (or in this case, online surveillance tool) that can only be used by the good guys. The Shadow Brokers hack and the resulting WannaCry attack show what can happen when hackers get their hands on such tools. By forcing all Kazakh citizens to use the same certificate, the government is introducing a significant vulnerability. If hackers were able to get […]

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Did Facebook End The Encryption Debate?

The ability of encryption to shield a user’s communications rests upon the assumption that the sender and recipient’s devices are themselves secure, with the encrypted channel the only weak point… [But] Facebook announced earlier this year preliminary results from its efforts to move a global mass surveillance infrastructure directly onto users’ devices where it can bypass the protections of end-to-end encryption. In Facebook’s vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself […]

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Cryptomator – The Easy Way to Securely Save Encrypted Files in Your Computer(s) and in the Cloud

If you want to keep a few secret documents or even applications, you need to encrypt them and hide them in your computer. If you have more than one computer (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.), you probably should have these secret, encrypted files automatically available on each computer and do that in such a manner that everything remains securely encrypted when copied to the other system(s). Even if you only […]

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US AG Barr Demands Tech Firms Break Encryption

Some politicians simply don’t understand the legitimate needs for encryption. If they are not careful, they may get what they wish for. The latest silliness involves US Attorney General Bill Barr who told attendees of a cybersecurity conference in New York that the government should be able to spy on everyone’s secrets. You can read more at: https://zd.net/2GvDE5C. What is encryption and why is it important? Encryption, is the process […]

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