Crypto is bigger on the inside! Join us for a drink at the Way Station – an awesome Dr. Who-themed bar in Brooklyn – while you answer geeky tech questions about nerd culture, cybersecurity, and tech policy. We’ll also secretly school you on the ways that crypto helps fight for your privacy and protects against mass surveillance.
Featuring cyber expert Amie Stepanovich, this NY Comic Con bookend event will get your creative juices flowing.
Mingling from 7p. Event starts at 7:30p sharp! RSVP here.
Facebook introduced encrypted notification emails back in June as part of its post-Snowden effort to provide more privacy to its customers.
Now, the company has announced support for another type of cryptography, and an email provider has made it easier to receive encrypted emails from the social media giant too.
Source: Vice Magazine
Near-Perfect Computer Security May Be Surprisingly Close:
In July 2013 a pair of studies set the cryptography world on fire. They were posted within days of one another to an online archive where researchers share their work, and together they described a powerful new method for hiding the secrets inside software programs.
The method was called “indistinguishability obfuscation,” or IO. The authors touted it as a “central hub” for all of cryptography—a unified basis upon which to reconstruct familiar cryptographic tools like public keys and selectively secure signatures.
Source: Wired
Last month, the National Security Agency quietly announced it would be abandoning the cryptography algorithms it has used since 2005 for fear of the coming computing revolution.
“Our ultimate goal is to provide cost effective security against a potential quantum computer,” the agency wrote on its website.
Source: Vice Magazine
Comey has been the most outspoken critic of Apple’s decision, repeatedly asking tech companies to come up with a solution—hinting that otherwise he’ll force them to—so that the FBI and cops don’t face a situation in which they can’t access key evidence during investigations, a problem the FBI calls “going dark.”
[But] so far, the FBI, and any other government agency, has failed to put forward a concrete, detailed proposal of what exactly the tech companies should do.
Meanwhile, security and cryptography experts have been critical of the FBI’s ideas, arguing that there’s no way to make a completely secure, encrypted system while also giving somebody—in this case cops and feds—a way to circumvent it, or a backdoor. Because if somebody can circumvent it, then malicious hackers or criminals can too.