pgp

He rocketed to privacy stardom over two decades ago with the release of PGP, the first widely available program that made it easy to encrypt e-mail. Now Phil Zimmermann wants to do the same thing for phone calls.

Zimmermann's new company, Silent Circle, plans to release a beta version of an iPhone and Android app in late July that encrypts phone calls and other communications. A final version is scheduled to follow in late September.

This time around, Zimmermann is facing not the possibility of prison time on charges of violating encryption export laws, but a more traditional challenge: … Read more

Some users of Symantec's PGP Desktop encryption software are finding that after installing OS X 10.7.4, the program does not appear to respond properly and encrypted disks can no longer be accessed. When attempting to mount the drives, nothing happens, and the program states in its logs that the disks are already mounted.

If you experience this problem, then you may find an entry similar to the following in the PGP Desktop log files:

... 2012-05-12 9:52:38: Setting up PGP Virtual Disks 2012-05-12 9:52:38: Setting up PGP Whole Disks 2012-05-12 9:52:39: Setting … Read more

American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.

Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21--or face the consequences including contempt of court.

Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,&… Read more

Symantec has announced it will buy encryption vendors PGP and GuardianEdge Technologies to boost its lineup.

The security company plans to integrate encryption products from PGP and GuardianEdge into its data loss prevention suite and endpoint protection products, it said in its acquisition announcement on Thursday.

"The two acquisitions will give us a market-leading position in the $1.4 billion per year encryption business," Symantec enterprise security group vice president Francis deSouza told ZDNet UK on Thursday. "At Symantec, we're focused on making data protection easier to manage, and these acquisitions represent a big step forward.&… Read more

Perhaps Google's announcement that Chinese cyber attackers went after human rights activists' Gmail accounts has made you skittish about just how private your own messages are on the Google e-mail service.

Well, if you want to take a significant step in keeping prying eyes away from your electronic correspondence, one good encryption technology that predates Google altogether is worth looking at. It's called public key encryption, and I'm sharing some instructions on how to get it working if you want try it.

Unfortunately, better security typically goes hand in hand with increased inconvenience. But some human rights … Read more

An extension for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, Enigmail is a must-use for anybody who's concerned about sending e-mail that can be read by anybody, including your Internet Service Provider. It's not intended to encrypt all of your mail, although you can certainly do that. Rather, it's best used for ensuring that even remotely sensitive e-mails don't get read by the wrong person.

It uses the OpenPGP standard to digitally sign your e-mail, and can be configured to accommodate multiple e-mail accounts. One hang up is that it's impossible with the current version to permanently decrypt e-mails, … Read more

VisualCron is a powerful program that allows users to automate a variety of computer functions. The program's many options are well-organized, making it easy to set up and run even complex tasks.

VisualCron's interface is attractive and intuitive. Users create a new job and then customize everything about it: what task or tasks it performs, what triggers it, what conditions it runs under, and how users are notified. Users move through a tabbed window for each job, choosing the proper settings. All of the jobs are listed neatly on the program's main screen, with other options displayed … Read more

It costs $6.6 million on average when an organization suffers a data breach, and more than $200 per compromised record, according to a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute that's due to be released on Monday.

The report, sponsored by PGP Corp., examined the costs incurred by 43 organizations that experienced a data breach. Breaches ranged as high as 113,000 records and the average total cost per company ranged from more than $613,000 per breach to nearly $32 million.

Most of the cost is due to lost business, which averaged nearly $4.6 million, the report … Read more

Even before someone hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account I had been wondering whatever happened to encryption.

Encryption -- the science of rendering plain text unreadable by anyone but the intended reader -- made a splash in the mid-1990s. At the time the U.S. government was investigating human rights activist Phil Zimmermann for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act by distributing his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) e-mail encryption software. The government eventually relaxed the restrictions and PGP was no longer programa non grata.

Nearly a decade has passed and it struck me recently that encryption still hasn'… Read more