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.
FBI director James B. Comey has for some time been a critic of encryption technologies, arguing that challenges for his agency are growing as groups they are monitoring "go dark"
VTech is a Chinese company, and in November, VTech's servers were hacked and the personal data of almost 5 million customers was stolen.
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 products.
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.
George Danezis from University College London has an excellent blog post detailing the most serious implications of the bill, particularly its gagging orders against disclosure of state surveillance.
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 it easy to retrieve passwords.
_Blockchain technology_ is starting to get attention in banking circles, as its tremendous potential for banking transactions becomes apparent.
Hard disk encryption prevents access to your confidential files if your PC or laptop is stolen.
The United States is no longer regarded as a "safe harbour" for EU data - and that's big (and welcome) news for Europeans.