Cryptography

Miami “bitcoin mayor” Francis Suarez has a new pitch to potential voters and investors: Bitcoin President. The 45-year-old mayor released a brief video announcing his candidacy on Thursday and filed FEC paperwork officially entering him into an increasingly crowded 2024 Republican primary field. Suarez, who bills himself as an energetic, tech-friendly futurist was one of several prominent US mayors who emphatically boosted Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the lead-up to the industry’s disastrous collapse last year.He…

Russia claimed Apple’s iPhones are spying on its citizens on Thursday and accused the U.S. of being behind it. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) claims the U.S. National Security Agency used malware and backdoors created on the devices to carry out a plot to spy on the citizens and government.How To Prep Your iPhone or iPad Before SellingThe FSB said in a statement to Sputnik International, a Russian state-owned news outlet, that the U.S. hacked thousands of Apple phones, including those of domestic Russian…

A coalition of over 90 organizations protested outside of Slack’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday, driving mobile billboards around Slack’s offices in a protest-style rally and calling on the company to enable end-to-end encryption and add blocking and reporting features. Why Banning TikTok Won’t Protect Our PrivacyFor certain kinds of white collar jobs, life revolves around Slack, the messaging app that’s managed to completely entwine itself into the culture of American knowledge work. With that kind of market power…

The best password managers are meant to keep all your logins and credit card info safe and secure, but a major new vulnerability has just put users of the KeePass password manager at serious risk of being breached. In fact, the exploit allows an attacker to steal a KeePass user’s master password in plain text — in other words, in an unencrypted form — simply by extracting it from the target computer’s memory. It’s a remarkably simple hack, yet one that could have worrying implications. The KeePass master password…

Twitter did it. The company met a deadline and released something on the promised date under Elon Musk’s leadership. The social media platform put out its first-ever encrypted messaging option late on Wednesday night, just under the wire. Yet in the mad dash to deliver, the site seems to have made some confusing compromises, as outlined in a Twitter blogpost. Video Chat - From Sci-Fi to Sci-FactEncrypted DMs on Twitter have been years in the making. The platform first began hinting at and exploring the possibility of…

ETH Zurich researchers performed a loophole-free Bell test with superconducting circuits, confirming quantum mechanics and disproving Einstein’s local causality concept. The findings open up possibilities in distributed quantum computing and quantum cryptography.ETH Zurich researchers have succeeded in demonstrating that quantum mechanical objects that are far apart can be much more strongly correlated with each other than is possible in conventional systems. For this experiment, they used superconducting circuits for the…

Too Long; Didn't ReadQuantum computing utilizes the laws of physics such as quantum mechanics to perform calculations significantly faster than classical computers. This opens up the door for thousands of potential applications such as financial modeling, optimization, quantum communication, and quantum cryptography. In this article, I will provide a brief rundown of quantum circuits and the principles of quantum mechanics that make it all work. Too Long; Didn't ReadQuantum computing utilizes the laws of physics such…

Google has announced what it calls the “beginning of the end” for passwords, rolling out a new security mechanism that it says will ultimately come to replace PWs in the years to come: the passkey. “We’ve taken a giant step forward on the journey towards a passwordless future,” Google said in a blog post published Wednesday. “We’ve begun rolling out support for passkeys across Google Accounts on all major platforms. This means users can now take advantage of passkeys across Google Services for a passwordless sign-in…

Encrypted email company Proton has announced one of the biggest new additions to its growing suite of privacy-focused apps: Proton Pass, an end-to-end encrypted password manager.Over the past few years the company has gone through a growth spurt, rolling out a host of new features to populate an ever expanding privacy ecosystem—including a VPN, an encrypted cloud Drive, and a calendar. Last year, it changed its name from ProtonMail to simply “Proton,” to signify its offerings had officially gone beyond email. Now, Proton…

Security researchers have publicly revealed findings in a study that uncovered that more than half of the enterprise routers sold secondhand to online resellers, such as eBay, had not been factory reset and wiped of their data. This means the devices still contained sensitive company information from their previous owners when they were resold. Researchers from the security firm ESET plan to showcase their study at the RSA security conference in San Francisco next week, but told Wired that they were able to uncover…