The downside of anonymity and privacy
We've written numerous posts that emphasise the importance of being able to maintain our privacy on the Internet, particularly when it comes to government attempts to mandate "backdoors" into encryption…
Blogs
France says no to encryption backdoors
France has joined the Netherlands in rejecting mandatory encryption backdoors in software products. We recently examined the UK's draft "snoopers charter" that includes this as a requirement. The French digital…
edtFTPj/PRO adds TLS 1.2
We've just released edtFTPj/PRO 5.0, adding support for TLS 1.2. At the start of the new year, it's interesting to look back over the release history of edtFTPj/PRO. Amazingly, it's…
Windows 10 and disk encryption
Hard disk encryption prevents access to your confidential files if your PC or laptop is stolen. Without disk encryption, retrieving your files from a stolen machine is trivial - your…
CompleteFTP's year of 2015
CompleteFTP is a secure Windows server that supports a number of file transfer protocols such as FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SCP and HTTP/S. During the last eight years, its regular release…
Former NSA officials back strong encryption
Some former NSA and CIA officials have recently made some good points about why use of strong encryption should not be curtailed or crippled. They point out that companies desperately…
The UK’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill Part 2
We looked at the UK's draft Investigatory Powers Bill recently, looking at the complex issue of secret government-mandated "back doors" into encryption software. But this isn't the only problem with…
VTech update
We recently posted about the VTech hack, in which millions of user account details were stolen from the Chinese toymaker. We noted that account passwords were hashed using MD5, making…
Massive VTech hack
For anyone with young children, VTech is a familiar name, a logo enblazoned on numerous toys cluttering up the house. VTech is a Chinese company, and in November, VTech's servers…
Does your browser support SHA-2 certificates?
We recently blogged about how the SHA-1 hash algorithm is now considered to be broken. Traditionally SHA-1 has been used in SSL certificates, which are how websites identify themselves to…