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. So now you must ask: Is your encryption good enough?

By weakening encryption - by requiring encryption providers to afford backdoors to governments - we open the way to criminality.

More worrying than the internet’s role in the rise of far-right populism is the digital tsunami poised to engulf us: AI and and ‘crypto-anarchists’ are radically restructuring life – and politics – as we know it

Confidential details of a top-secret encryption-breaking supercomputer were left completely exposed on an unsecured computer server belonging to New York University (NYU), according to a new report.

The UK government is secretly planning to force technology companies to build backdoors into their products, to enable intelligence agencies to read people’s private messages. A draft document leaked by the Open Rights Group details extreme new surveillance proposals, which would enable government agencies to spy on one in 10,000 citizens – around 6,500 people – at any one time. 

Porn sites need to have good security. Hackers have repeatedly targeted such sites and made off with user data, including usernames and passwords. But, although it's not a totally mutually exclusive concept, porn sites should consider the privacy of their users too. On Thursday, both Pornhub and YouPorn announced they were switching on HTTPS on their websites, which protects data in transit between users' browsers and the sites' servers.

The home secretary has made a hash – or what she would call “a hashtag” – of her efforts to appear to be doing something in the wake of last week’s Westminster terror attack. Amber Rudd’s demand that the big digital companies weaken the encryption they use on their messages is unrealistic and – if it ever became real – self-defeating. It is unrealistic because encryption cannot be selectively weakened, any more than the value of pi could be stipulated as 3.2 for the state of Indiana alone as proposed by some proto-Rudd politician in 1897.

If anything, the documents confirm the strength of encryption technologies.

NEARLY THREE YEARS have passed since Google announced it would offer an end-to-end encryption add-on for Gmail, a potentially massive shift in the privacy options of a piece of software used by more than a billion people. It still hasn’t materialized. And while Google insists its encryption plugin isn’t vaporware, the company’s latest move has left critics with the distinct impression that Gmail’s end-to-end encrypted future looks cloudy at best—if not altogether evaporated.

NEWS ANALYSIS: Two secure messaging apps are hot new topics among the Washington elite, one of which is more secure than the others.

xkcd’s well-circulated wrench scenario, pictured above, is demonstrated hauntingly well by this week’s story of Sidd Bikkannavar, a US-born NASA engineer who was coerced into breaching the security of his government-issued phone in order to enter the United States. US Customs and Border Patrol detained Bikkannavar, who like me has Global Entry, upon entering and demanded he unlock his cell phone for searching. About 30 minutes later, he got his phone back and was free to go. He’s still unaware what took place during that time.

When the feds demanded the encryption key for Lavabit, the company shut down rather than comply. Now it’s set to relaunch.

Swiss-based PGP end-to-end encrypted email provider, ProtonMail, now has an onion address, allowing users to access its service via a direct connection to the..

Poorly secured MongoDB installations deleted and held for ransom.

We all trust cloud-based file storage services to keep our data safe from prying eyes, right?

Camera manufacturers need to build in Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is publishing an open letter to the world’s leading camera manufacturers—including Nikon, Sony, Canon, Olympus, and Fuji—urging them to build encryption into their still photo and video cameras to help protect the filmmakers and photojournalists who use them. The letter is signed by over 150 documentary filmmakers and photojournalists from around the world, including fifteen Academy Award nominees and winners, such as Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney, Joshua Oppenheimer, and many more. You can read the full text below.to protect filmmakers and photojournalists.

A in-development ransomware was discovered called Popcorn Time that intends to give victim's a very unusual way of getting a free decryption key.  With Popcorn Time, not only can a victim pay a ransom to get their files back, but they can also try to infect two other people and have them pay the ransom in order to get a free key.

After weeks of speculation, President-elect Donald Trump today named Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as his choice for attorney general. The choice has already alarmed Trump critics for a number of reasons — particularly his role in drafting Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban muslim immigration — but for tech companies, there may be another concern entirely. Less than a year after prosecutors took Apple to court over an iPhone linked to the San Bernardino shootings, a Sessions-led Justice Department could be exactly what law enforcement needs to restart the encryption fight.

Mass hacking is now one of the FBI's established tactics for fighting crime on the dark web. In February 2015, the agency hit at least 4,000 computers all over the world in an attempt to identify visitors of a child pornography site. But questions remain about another FBI operation from 2013, in which the agency may have hacked users of a dark web email service called TorMail even if they weren’t suspects of a crime. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is trying to unseal the court docket...