You are still being watched, and your data being collected, so be careful what you send and to where you send it too. Innocent messages sent out of the country can easily make you become a person of interest for no reason.
Online collaboration over the claimed proof "P versus NP" demonstrates the potential of the internet in the field of mathematical and intellectual research alike. The proof "P versus NP," if verified, would make obsolete modern cryptography, which works under the assumption that P does not equal NP.
"Latest on the computer analyst whistleblower who provided the Guardian with top-secret NSA documents leading to revelations about US surveillance on phone and internet communications" - compilation of news sources on Edward Snowden
Summary: Cryptography specialists have developed tools to crack PPTP encryption (based on an algorithm from Microsoft), gaining access to Wi-Fi, passwords, corporate networks and data.
Quote: What you are looking at is one of the many undersea cables that carries inside it, to put it simply, the magic of the Internet. This particular cable, which runs aground on the coast of Florida, has been tapped by the NSA according to Paglen's research. Paglen, an artist who has been documenting the physical footprint of surveillance for years, got scuba-certified in order to go diving "at several locations off the coast of Florida," he says, to find and photograph the cables.
I really just wonder what kind of decision-making went into creating this document--what they decided to add and take out, etc. This source also has outside sources on the final pages.
Malicious adverts have been found on the UK version of the Match.com dating website. Anyone caught out by the booby-trapped ads could fall victim to ransomware, said security company Malwarebytes, which spotted the cyber-threat. The malicious ads appeared on pages of the dating site via an ad network that pipes content to Match and many other places.
What really stood out to me about this article was that they said the NSA actually pays more attention to those people who use encryption. So, in order to protect ourselves and also avoid prying NSA eyes, we should encourage people to stand in solidarity with encryption. I thought this was really interesting because I always thought that encryption would undoubtedly make everything more secure, but here they're saying that it actually attracts attention (which isn't necessarily a good thing).
When I was a kid, I read an issue of Superman in which he faces Batman's villain, the Joker. At one point, the Joker tells Superman that he's kidnapped all of Superman's best friends (Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and so on) and locked them inside lead-lined caskets, hidden throughout Metropolis. Since the caskets are air-tight, they only have an hour to live, and Superman can't find them because his x-ray vision can't see through lead! That's what the Joker said. Actually, since Superman can't see through lead, those caskets *stood out* when he scanned the city with his x-ray vision, and he rescued all his friends in short order.
Same basic idea.
Interesting article on how public-key encryption is used to keep information safe during financial transactions online. The article discusses weakness in basic public-key encryption schemes and how some of these schemes have been improved.
This article is about a smartphone that's designed specifically to help you keep your personal information secure--it lets you easily encrypt your calls and texts and search the internet privately. There's also a video about ways to encrypt your email.
This website discusses procedure and purpose of encrypting sensitive data over the internet. SSL is a protocol which "determines variables of the encryption" being used to protect information from first names to credit card numbers. This website also tells you how to determine whether or not a website is secure or if your information is vulnerable. In addition, there is another page that delves into the mathematics and actual cryptography procedures behind online encryption like RSA and ECC.
This article gives a method for generating secure yet easy to remember passwords for online accounts, using encryption and modular arithmetic (!). It is an interesting use of encryption in everyday life for something we all have, password-protected internet accounts. If you click through to the computer science category, you can find other posts on cryptography, encryption, and privacy.