Displaying items by tag: NSA

Newly minted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had some interesting things to say about data privacy and how it effects Microsoft in the global market place. The comments, although made during an HP event in Las Vegas are another part of the PR campaign that Microsoft has embarked on after the departure of Steve Ballmer. Some of the first moves were to small items intended to shore up some potentially dangers areas in the market.

A couple of days ago Google started pushing encryption for e-mail. No, we are not talking about the typical https connection required for Gmail. We are talking about actually encryption of email as it moves from server to server using TLS (Transport Layer Security). In simplest terms this method creates connections between servers using a secure tunnel to each other for the purposes of transmitting the message. Once the message has been passed to the destination server the tunnel closes. However, despite the length of time TLS has been around not many companies use.

In the post Snowden world people are concerned about privacy (rightfully so). The revelation that the companies we have trusted with our personal information and data might be working with government agencies to catalog and track what we do and say is a sobering one. It also raises concerns about how to protect our individual rights moving forward. In many ways the public reaction is similar to what happened when the first widely distributed and harmful viruses hit the streets.

The big news today is that Google is preparing to encrypt their search data. They are planning to automatically encrypt not only the connections, but the information sent back to the user. On the surface this would seem to be a big step towards preventing people like the NSA from finding out what we do on the internet and it would be in line with consumer demands for more protection from spying eyes. The question is, will this move actually do anything or is it all just a feel good PR event.

On Monday at the South by Southwest show infamous NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden talk via a live video conference. By all accounts the hall where the conference was held was packed as people were very interested to hear what Snowden had to say. For those of you that might not know, or need reminding Edward Snowden was a contractor to the NSA and is responsible for leaking information about multiple, highly-classified and potentially illegal (unconstitutional) surveillance programs being run on US Citizens and also on foreign diplomats.

After the discovery of mass surveillance by the famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, numerous products with an emphasis on protecting users' privacy appeared on the market. One of them comes from smartphone company FreedomPop and it's called Privacy Phone. Devices that protect privacy often come at a hefty price, but Privacy Phone corrects this complaint and will arrive on the market with a price tag of $189.

Lately the news has had a few articles about how companies like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo etc. are pushing the government for radical changes to their surveillance policies and demanding better protections for their customers. We have seen new ads focused on explaining how important our data is to them (and in some cases how the other guys are abusing it). The groups lining up and demanding change are many of the same companies that Edward Snowden’s bevy of leaked documents claimed were working hand in hand with the NSA to allow for mass spying on peoples’ data and that in cases where they were not directly cooperating lax security practices allowed for easy retrieval of user information.

The slippery slope of Censorship that many predicted when SOPA, PIPA and other IP protecting laws first hit the scene is starting to come true in the UK. After winning a battle to apply network (ISP) level filters for Pornographic and File Sharing sites the UK government is now moving on to what they are labeling “extremist” web sites. On the surface they claim they want to stop extremist rhetoric on the internet (which is still not a good thing) and are working to bundle this in with existing laws that allow for the blocking of pornography and file sharing.

According to new information provided to the media by Edward Snowden,  American National Security Agency (NSA) has set a malicious software into more than 50,000 computer networks of the world.

Microsoft has announced that from next year they will automatically encrypt the origin of e-mail sent through its services Office 365. The new option, called Office 365 Message Encryption, will allow users to automatically send encrypted e-mail messages to recipients outside their organization.