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A Sacramento woman uses her phone on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Hector Amezcua hamezcua@sacbee.com A national debate over smartphone encryption arrived in Sacramento on Tuesday as legislators defeated a bill penalizing companies that don’t work with courts to break into phones, siding with technology industry representatives who called the bill a dangerous affront to privacy. The bill did not receive a vote, with members of the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection worrying the measure would undermine data security and impose a logistically untenable requirement on California companies. Disagreement over the balance between privacy and public safety exploded into...

Analysis In the wake of the FBI's failed fight against Apple, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have introduced a draft bill that would effectively ban strong crypto. The bill would require tech and communications companies to allow law enforcement with a court order to decrypt their customers' data. Last week a draft copy of the bill, dubbed the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, was leaked, but the new version is even worse than the discussion draft.... The senators want to have their cake--by requiring tech companies to protect their customers' data--and eat it too--by insisting...

A cross-platform messaging app owned by Facebook leapfrogs iMessage; Apple should step up and join it. credit: WhatsApp Apple’s security and encryption strategies have received a lot of attention lately, from the way in which iOS devices’ data are locked down to how Apple doesn’t have the encryption keys the iMessage and FaceTime systems employ to secure its users’ communications to how Secure Enclave keeps our secrets secret. But WhatsApp, an app-based text, video, and voice service with a billion users, took the spotlight Tuesday with the news that its users have end-to-end encryption as well. WhatsApp has a couple...

It's no secret that law enforcement agencies and governments at large want to have access to our personal data whether we like it or not. Hot on the heels of the FBI managing to bypass security measures that should have protected the data on a terrorist's iPhone 5c, we see that the case is definitely not closed. As many had suspected, now that the floodgates are open, agencies like the FBI are not content to let this one win be the last. This week, draft legislation leaked out of the U.S. Senate that to some highlights the government's ignorance about encryption. Within...

FBI spills the beans on how it hacked the iPhone to US senators The US Justice Department is looking to file a court order to force Apple to help the FBI unlock an iPhone that was obtained as part of a New York drug dealing case, it has been reported on 9 April. The move follows a recent attempt in March to force the tech giant to crack an iPhone used by a terrorist in the December 2015 attacks in San Bernardino, California. The San Bernardino order was reportedly dropped the US government said the FBI had unlocked the phone...

FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that the government had purchased "a tool" from a private party in order to unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. "Litigation between the government and Apple over the San Bernardino phone has ended, because the government has purchased, from a private party, a way to get into that phone, 5C, running iOS 9," Comey said. Law enforcement officials revealed in late March that they had finally cracked the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of two shooters in the December 2015 attack that left 14 people dead. But they...

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is slamming messaging platform WhatsApp for turning on end-to-end encryption for all of its users.... WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and is particularly popular outside the United States, said on Tuesday that it would start offering encryption for its users as the default setting. That will apply to the different types of messages on the service, which include video and voice. "Every day we see stories about sensitive records being improperly accessed or stolen," WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton said in a post announcing the change. "And if nothing is done, more of...

"all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer" So the only thing preventing a more general purpose quantum computer is money and enough engineers... Hmm... (POLL-AT-LINK) Via: PC World: Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they've created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes. In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or...

Apple has quickly released a patch for a flaw in its encryption capability for the iOS mobile and OS X desktop operating systems which could allow attackers to unscramble protected iMessage photos and videos. First reported by the Washington Post, a group of researchers led by cryptographer Matthew Green at John Hopkins University discovered they could intercept iMessage content stored in Apple's iCloud by brute-force guessing the encryption key. With the encryption key at hand, attackers could retrieve files from iCloud accounts without users knowing. Attackers would need to be able to bypass Apple’s TLS certificate pinning, which associates the...

A pair of House committees is forming a bipartisan working group of eight lawmakers to prepare for possible legislation addressing how the widespread use of encryption affects law enforcement investigations. "The bipartisan encryption working group will examine the issues surrounding this ongoing national debate," House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Energy and Commerce Committee Fred Upton. R-Mich., said Monday. As chairman of the two committees that have jurisdiction over encryption issues, Goodlatte and Upton are ex officio chairs of the working group. They released that statement jointly along with Michigan Rep. John Conyers and New Jersey Rep. Steve...

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday made a passionate case for mobile devices to be built in such a way as to allow government to gain access to personal data if needed to prevent a terrorist attack or enforce tax laws. Speaking at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, Obama said he could not comment on the legal case in which the FBI is trying to force Apple Inc. to allow access to an iPhone linked to San Bernardino, California, shooter Rizwan Farook. But he made clear that, despite his commitment to Americans' privacy and...

In the interests of brevity here's the dangerous part of this bill that's being discussed in California today: b) A smartphone that is manufactured on or after January 1, 2017, and sold or leased in California, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.

It was supposed to be a chummy weekend with GOP lawmakers and billionaires. Instead, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) got into it with Apple CEO Tim Cook over his company's refusal to help the FBI hack into iPhones. The exchange, which took place at the American Enterprise Institute's World Forum, left a number of attendees "a little uncomfortable about how hostile Cotton was," a source familiar with the back-and-forth told The Huffington Post on Monday....

New York—Amazon has confirmed it removed the ability to encrypt locally stored data on its Fire tablets, saying that customers weren't using the service. The change comes as Apple squares off against the FBI over access to an encrypted iPhone. Apple says giving the government access would make all other iPhones more vulnerable to hacks. But the encryption that Amazon has removed is somewhat different than the security involved in the Apple case. And Amazon made the change well before the brouhaha started. Amazon made the switch when it introduced its new Fire OS 5 in September with new Fire...

France will consider a law that would impose fines of €1 million on Apple and Google if they refused to hack into smartphones belonging to terrorists. On Monday, French Socialist MP Yann Galut proposed an amendment to French law that - if passed - would see the US companies punished if they didn't give French officials backdoor access to terrorists' phones. In France last year, there were eight phones that were inaccessible to police - all tied in some way to terror attacks, reports Le Parisien. Galut said on Monday that companies like Apple and Google should be fined up...

SlySoft Inc. is a software company registered in the Carribean country of Antigua and Barbuda. For the past few years, the firm has been a thorn in the side of Hollywood studios and game makers by creating and releasing software that would circumvent DRM and copyright protections on CDs and DVDs. Its product line includes tools like AnyDVD, AnyDVD HD, Clone CD, CloneDVD mobile, Virtual Clone Drive, Game Jackal, and Game Jackal Enterprise. With no doubt, the company's most known product is AnyDVD, a device driver used by many movie, game, and software piracy groups (and even home users) to...

The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration. We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews...

Messaging service now delivering 15 billion messages every day, adding 350,000 users a day. Secure messaging app Telegram has hit 100 million monthly active users -- with 350,000 new users signing up each day. The company said it is delivering 15 billion messages a day, up from August last year when the app was transmitting 10 billion messages each day. Telegram allows users to send messages, photos, videos, and files of any type (doc, zip, MP3, etc), as well as create groups for up to 1,000 people or channels for broadcasting messages to larger audiences. It's free to use, which...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Folks, on this Apple and the Department of Justice and the FBI. Do you believe how big this has gotten? You know, people make fun of me both here at the EIB Network and in my personal life. They make fun of me over my passion for these devices, which is okay. People have made fun of me my whole life. They made fun of the fact that I really like Apple. They made fun of the fact that I'm an expert in these things. I've had people over the weekend sending me questions, comments, about this...