RT America | April 22, 2016
Congress has long aimed to take on the issue of encryption, even before the high-profile spat between Apple and the FBI after the San Bernardino terror attack. The House Judiciary Committee created a new bipartisan taskforce to examine encryption, focusing on legal and policy matters relating to privacy. RT America’s Anya Parampil reports.
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Tech firms are scrambling to fix a security flaw that left Google and Apple users open to hacking for over a decade. A weak encryption code, which was used on supposedly safe sites such as WhiteHouse.gov, NSA.gov and FBI.gov, can be used in browsers and then cracked within a few hours, allowing for hackers to steal passwords and more information.
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A new report confirmed key brands, including Cisco, Apple, Intel, and McAfee – among others – have been dropped from the Chinese government’s list of authorized brands. (photo: CBS News)
Zack Whittaker | ZDNet | Reader Supported News | February 26, 2015
hina is no longer using high-profile US technology brands for state purchases, amid ongoing revelations about mass surveillance and hacking by the US government.
A new report confirmed key brands, including Cisco, Apple, Intel, and McAfee — among others — have been dropped from the Chinese government’s list of authorized brands, a Reuters report said Wednesday.
The number of approved foreign technology brands fell by a third, based on an analysis of the procurement list. Less than half of those companies with security products remain on the list.
Although a number of reasons were cited, domestic companies were said to offer “more product guarantees” than overseas rivals in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks. Some reports have attempted to pin a multi-billion dollar figure on the impact of the leaks.
BUSINESS LEADER’S RESPONSE TO APPLE CEO TIM COOK’S STATEMENT TODAY
By John Roberts, partner at Denver Investments, founder of the Workplace Equality Index™
John Roberts, a partner at Denver Investments and founder of the Workplace Equality Index™ (www.workplaceequalityindex.com): “Tim Cook’s eloquent statement reinforces what we call the “return on equality.” His character and truthfulness are traits that tend to shape corporate performance, especially among equality-minded corporations like Apple. Put simply, Cook’s example mirrors Apple’s own commitment to global equality.”
Roberts also noted that Apple is among the 164 U.S. companies that appear in the Workplace Equality Index, an innovative stock market benchmark that educates investors about the performance of corporate leaders in LGBT equality. An exchange-traded fund (ETF) designed to track the performance of the Workplace Equality Index™ also is available.
James Stewart | The Age | October 31, 2014
Apple chief Tim Cook with U2 at the launch of the new iPhone 6. Photo: Getty Images
Tim Cook’s declaration Thursday that “I’m proud to be gay” made him the first publicly gay chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. But Cook isn’t just any chief executive. And Apple isn’t any company. It’s one of the most profitable companies in the Fortune 500 and ranks No. 1 on the magazine’s annual ranking of the most admired companies.
As Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein put it: “He’s chief executive of the Fortune One. Something has consequences because of who does it, and this is Tim Cook and Apple. This will resonate powerfully.”
Trevor Burgess, the openly gay chief executive of C1 Financial in Florida, and one of the first publicly gay chief executives of a public company, said Tim Cook used “the metaphor of laying a brick on the ‘path towards justice.'” But “this is more like 600 million bricks”, Burgess said. “He has the most influential voice in global business.”
Richard Socarides | The New Yorker | Reader Supported News | October 30, 2014
n Thursday morning, the head of one of the world’s most admired companies, Tim Cook, of Apple, announced that he is gay. Although not entirely a surprise, Cook had guarded his privacy. As he put it in a piece for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now,” adding pointedly and poignantly, “So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.” Cook instantly became the most prominent openly gay C.E.O. in history.
Cook’s announcement is one of many signs that gay rights is no longer an automatic wedge issue in American culture and politics. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to review appellate court rulings that overturned gay-marriage bans, a move that brought marriage equality to more than a dozen new states. The news has been almost all good (with some notable exceptions, such as the continuing discrimination in Africa and other parts of the world). But, historically, an intense news focus on gay rights and same-sex marriage has usually been followed by some sort of backlash, often felt during national elections. For example, in 2004, President George W. Bush won reëlection at least in part because his political operatives drew conservative voters to the polls in swing states by placing gay marriage on the ballot in the form of state constitutional amendments. Further back, President Bill Clinton, during his 1996 reëlection campaign, was so worried about being portrayed as favoring marriage rights for gays that he signed the Republican-sponsored Defense of Marriage Act. (I was an adviser to Clinton at the time.) That same year, his opponent, Senator Bob Dole, returned a contribution from a gay Republican group because he did not want to be seen as linked to its agenda. And, in 2008, then Senator Barack Obama walked back his previous support for marriage equality in order to run for President as a candidate opposed to gay marriage. It took him until May of 2012 to publicly say that he personally supported marriage equality, in an announcement whose timing was forced by Joe Biden. Even then, Obama was said to be taking a big risk.
Not this year. When I asked Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Democratic strategist and former senior congressional aide, where the issue of gay marriage was playing in this year’s midterm elections, he replied, “Frankly, nowhere.” Fred Sainz, the communications director for the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay-rights organization, answered the same question by saying, “Exactly the way we want it.”
In the past couple of days both Google [i] and Apple [ii] have announced that they’re enabling default encryption on their mobile devices so that only the user possessing a device’s password can access its local files. The public relations team at Apple makes the following claim:
“Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data… So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8″
The marketing drones at Google issued a similar talking point:
“For over three years Android has offered encryption, and keys are not stored off of the device, so they cannot be shared with law enforcement… As part of our next Android release, encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you won’t even have to think about turning it on.”
Quite a sales pitch? Cleverly disguised as a news report no less. Though it’s not stated outright the tacit message is: open your wallet for the latest gadget and you’ll be safe from Big Brother. Sadly, to a large degree this perception of warrant protection is the product of Security Theater aimed at rubes and shareholders. The anti-surveillance narrative being dispensed neglects the myriad of ways in which such device-level encryption can be overcome. A list of such techniques has been enumerated by John Young, the architect who maintains the Cryptomeleak site [iii]. Young asks readers why he should trust hi-tech’s sales pitch and subsequently presents a series of barbed responses. For example:
Image via CrunchBase
Devindra Hardawar | Venture Beat | Reader Supported News | January 1, 2014
s 2013 edges to a close, reports of the NSA’s widespread surveillance capabilities have reached new heights of absurdity.
A report from Der Spiegel over the weekend highlighted the NSA’s elite TAO hacking unit, which directly targets corporate networks and can even place spyware on devices while they’re being shipped to recipients. And yesterday, security researcher Jacob Applebaum and Der Spiegel blew the lid off another NSA program, dubbed “DROPOUTJEEP,” which gives the agency fully control of Apple’s iPhone.
Once the NSA’s malware is on an iPhone, the agency can access just about any data on the device, including text messages, contact lists, geolocation history, and voicemail, according to a leaked NSA document (below). It can also remotely enable the iPhone’s camera and microphone.
Applebaum, who coauthored the story in Der Spiegel also detailed how the NSA’s iPhone surveillance works during a talk at this week’s Chaos Communications Congress, an annual hacker get-together. You can view the second part of his talk below, with the iPhone discussion beginning at 44:30.
National Security Agency (Photo credit: Scott Beale)
Sreeja VN | International Business Times | Social Reader | December 9, 2013
The leading Internet and technology companies of the U.S. have joined together to launch a public campaign against the country’s surveillance laws, and to urge the government to overhaul practices that allow the National Security Agency, or NSA, to spy on companies’ databases for access to users’ private data.
The coalition titled “Reform Government Surveillance” is the latest attempt by companies to stop or limit the NSA from accessing the personal information of Internet users, following revelations about the controversial surveillance practices employed by the agency that were made with the help of documents obtained by former defense contractor, Edward Snowden. The tech giants’ latest public revolt also coincides with President Barack Obama’s plans to introduce changes to laws governing the NSA’s surveillance programs.
Technology majors — Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) and AOL (NYSE:AOL) — in an open letter to Obama and Congress, called for sweeping changes to the way the NSA collected data under its previously secret surveillance programs.
Daily Queer News 