David Piniella

ProtonMail Blog – News and Updates.

Just got access to the public beta of this; here’s to hoping others follow suit.

The web forum 4chan is known mostly as a place to share juvenile and, to put it mildly, politically incorrect images. But it’s also the birthplace of one of the latest attempts to subvert the NSA’s mass surveillance program.

When whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that full extent of the NSA’s activities last year, members of the site’s tech forum started talking about the need for a more secure alternative to Skype. Soon, they’d opened a chat room to discuss the project and created an account on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub and began uploading code.

Eventually, they settled on the name Tox, and you can already download prototypes of the surprisingly easy-to-use tool. The tool is part of a widespread effort to create secure online communication tools that are controlled not only by any one company, but by the world at large—a continued reaction to the Snowden revelations. This includes everything from instant messaging tools to email services.

via Out in the Open: Hackers Build a Skype That’s Not Controlled by Microsoft | Enterprise | WIRED.

 

It’s a shame that w.a.s.t.e. died such an ignoble death — mostly because it was hard to set up, I think. Even so, IM was just a side-feature, not it’s raison d’etre, so you can still make an argument for Tox and against w.a.s.t.e., despite the very nice Pynchon reference.

To show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot, he points me to a map that he and his customers have created, indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July alone.  Interceptors look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower.  Once the phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of “over-the-air” attacks become possible, from eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith says.  “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip.  We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

via Mysterious Phony Cell Towers Could Be Intercepting Your Calls | Popular Science.

BYOD is a huge security problem in organizations, but this is just a friendly reminder: if you’re out in the world, you have to expect attacks.