Very interesting NYT article about Snowden, Laura Poitras, & Glenn Greenwald

Longer, more in depth article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?pagewanted=all and a shorter one that is also used in longer article http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/snowden-maass-transcript.html

Lot of people know who Snowden and Greenwald are now, I think fewer know who Laura Poitras is, sad to say I didn't before seeing this article.

For quick reference about these people see their Wikipedia links:

• Poitras http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras
• Greenwald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald
• Snowden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden

Lot of things of interest in above links.

Close reading of the NYT's article can provide some useful insights and tidbits to serious security.

I also want to note one comment by Snowden: 

"I was surprised to realize that there were people in news organizations who didn’t recognize any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world. In the wake of this year’s disclosures, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless. "

Security & Hacking News: NYT "Two Providers of Encrypted E-Mail Shut Down"

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/two-providers-of-encrypted-e-mail-shut-down/

Sounds like some secure email companies are shutting down to avoid being forced to betray their customers.

I have a lot of respect for them, if that is what is going on, just hope some other companies might follow suit, or at least be inspired to do something more than they have so far.

Lavabit was supposedly used by Snowden.

Though I am personally frustrated, since I had just recently started researching Silent Circle as possible secure option, and that certainly isn't possible now, based on this snipped from NYT link above:

"Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview late Thursday that his company had destroyed its server. “Gone. Can’t get it back. Nobody can,” he said. “We thought it was better to take flak from customers than be forced to turn it over.” "

Additional links:

Lavabit (has statement from owner about situation):  http://lavabit.com/
Silent Circle:  https://silentcircle.com/
Silent Circle Twitter: https://twitter.com/Silent_Circle

Nerd News: BBM VOIP WiFi Only Beta

Press Release from RIM:  http://press.rim.com/newsroom/press/2012/bbm-now-lets-you-have-voice-chats-for-free-over-wi-fi.html

RIM has released a Beta of BBM (Blackberry Messenger) that supports VOIP between BBM users over WiFi.

The Beta is available here https://beta.webapps.blackberry.com/login/

From the press release "BBM version 7 with the new BBM Voice feature is currently available in Beta for BlackBerry smartphones running the BlackBerry® 6 OS or higher."

I have a Blackberry Bold 9780, though I am planning on switching to a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 this Christmas, in large part because I don't have a lot of hope that Blackberry will survive their business mistakes.

I would be happy to be wrong about this, because I really like several features that Blackberry phones have, that no one else does.

Their security is a big one, though newer iPhones (iPhone 4S or newer) have good enough security to replace that functionality.

I also really like the optical track pad of newer Blackberry's, for me that works a lot better than touchscreens, this is a big part of the reason I am going to the Galaxy Note II, the Stylus will provide precision, that I can't get otherwise with touchscreens.

BBM is the third big thing I will miss about Blackberry, if your not familiar with it, it works like Skype Chat, though probably a bit more secure than Microsoft's Skype, considering the news about Skype's password reset hack.

I have been looking at PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to replace that element.

Random Wikipedia of the Day (RWotD): Pretty Good Privacy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Security_quality

Pretty Good Post ^_^

Couldn't resist, I am a card carrying wise acre after all!

Link to PGP site http://www.openpgp.org/

For those not familiar with this, it is a very useful way to encrypt email & etc, basically you provide people or the public, with your public key.

Doesn't matter if people trying to crack it know that, and people use your public key to encrypt messages they want to send to you, then you use your private key, which you do need to keep private like a password, to decode it.

I will probably play around with this when I get Android phone, I am used to security that my Blackberry provides, and want something secure to replace that, when I switch to Samsung Galaxy Note 2.