Old Article Comments I exported these from my old wordpress blog, so they are a bit out of date, but I thought I’d keep them around for posterity. [billjonesgeneralstore] - Nov 5, 2013 Reblogged this on You Better Watch Out.

An excellent and informing interview with the founder of the Lavabit email service, who was recently involved in a legal case with the FBI, who attempted to force him to hand over SSL encryption keys. This was of course the email service used by Edward Snowden, so attracted a lot of attention. There’s some really interesting technical stuff in here, specifically about the value of perfect forward secrecy in HTTPS encryption, which he wasn’t using, and how he protected his user’s data, in many clever ways.

Do you have an Android phone? Some interesting news I read this week was that an innocuous (on by default) setting on Android phones can save your Wifi passwords on Google’s servers. It also backs up all your app settings, bookmarks and so on. This isn’t that worrying - it could be considered a useful feature. However, the worrying thing is that these plain-text passwords aren’t encrypted using your account details - they are available in unencrypted form to Google employees.

I found some interesting old news, back from 1999 that someone posted a link to in the SecurityNow newsgroups. I’ve recently started listening to this podcast - it’s a brilliant way to keep up with computer security news, and I feel a lot more informed having started to listen. http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html The articles were to do with NSA back doors in several pieces of software, Microsoft Windows and Lotus Notes. Both of these were verified back in 2009 by security researchers by reverse engineering software.