Alan Rusbridger speaks out on Edward Snowden
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was in Johannesburg this week and spoke at Wits University about the news organisation #39;s decision to publish the Edward Snowden revelations. Read the...
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Alan Rusbridger speaks out on Edward Snowden - Video
(Don Ryan/Associated Press)
Reports of U.S. spying on German citizens -- including German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- caused outrage in the European nationlast year after a wave of revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. It even led to German parliamentaryhearings on the issue, which started this spring.
And now the German government is ending itscontractwith Verizon over fears the telecom provider could be letting U.S. intelligence agencies snoop on sensitive communications, the Associated Press reports.
"There are indications that Verizon is legally required to provide certain things to the NSA, and that's one of the reasons the cooperation with Verizon won't continue," German Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate told AP. Verizon has provided Internet service to a number of German government departments but not intelligence to agencies according to Plate.
Germany's current contract with Verizon will expire in 2015, he said.
"Verizon Germany is a German company, and we comply with German law," saidVerizon Germany managing director Detlef Eppig in a statement, which also referred questions to a post on the company's policy blog that it says outlines "the inability of the US Government to access customer data stored outside the US."
While various officials, including Merkel, have expressed concern about U.S. spying, a report from German magazine Der Spiegel last week suggested a close relationship between the NSA and German intelligenceagencies.
Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government.
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German government to drop Verizon over NSA spying fears
Germany is irked that the NSA spied on its officials (including its Chancellor), and today it responded by hitting the US where it really hurts: the pocketbook. The German Ministry of the Interior has decided against renewing a Verizon internet service contract that expires in 2015, in no small part due to worries that the carrier must sometimes hand over foreign data to the NSA. The country has to reject companies that collaborate with the American intelligence agency if it's going to meet the "particularly high demands" of a critical communication infrastructure, according to the Ministry.
The nation had already been second-guessing the contract, so Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance leaks were really just the straws that broke the camel's back. However, the cancellation still validates US tech firms' worst fears -- they're losing business in countries which no longer feel they can trust American outfits with sensitive info. It's too soon to know whether this trend will continue, but it's clear that even close US allies aren't afraid to cut corporate ties if they believe their data is at risk.
[Image credit: AFP Photo/Jewel Samad]
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Germany drops Verizon internet contract over NSA spying fears
Image steganography in DWT domain using double stegging with RSA encryption
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Image steganography in DWT domain using double stegging with RSA encryption - Video
GIMP Tutorial - The Art of Smudge Painting a Selfie or Photo by VscorpianC
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GIMP Tutorial - The Art of Smudge Painting a Selfie or Photo by VscorpianC - Video
Entwicklertag 2014: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle - Open Source Software Developer Career and Its Benefits
Open source software development is changing the labor market for software developers. Benefits of participation in open source projects can be increased sal...
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Entwicklertag 2014: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle - Open Source Software Developer Career and Its Benefits - Video
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Where might Red Hat be looking next, as it seeks to grow its cloud computing presence, capabilities and community? As has been the case for some time, cloud computing and some adjacent technology trends, such as Big Data, DevOps and storage, are likely to drive Red Hat's next M&A move. A prominent target might be Docker, whose open source containerization technology features prominently in RHEL 7.
Red Hat is famous for its ability to focus squarely on a market and technology and build success from there, as it did with Linux. However, the company increasingly has diverged from its roots and historical laser focus on the enterprise x86 server market with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The overarching theme and identity of Red Hat is still open source software, but the main driver for the company clearly is now cloud computing, which is intertwined with open source.
Red Hat continued its climb into cloud computing with its US$95 million cash-and-stock acquisition of eNovance, a French OpenStack consulting shop that bolsters Red Hat's services and support story. During its FY Q1 2015 earnings call -- the same day the eNovance deal was announced -- Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said drivers of the deal were the top needs of Red Hat's OpenStack users and potential customers: installation and management, along with consulting on workflows and process.
Red Hat has not focused its business or most of its acquisitions on service and support, but eNovance highlights how critical consulting is to an OpenStack market that is anything but out-of-the-box for users and customers. This is particularly true for large enterprises and service providers that have legacy infrastructure, processes and people.
The deal for eNovance marks a more aggressive effort by Red Hat to expand its presence in Europe, where it has some traction in the enterprise and public sector markets, but not as much as it has had in North America.
Of course, eNovance isn't the only recent deal for Red Hat. Last month, it acquired open source Ceph storage backer Inktank for $175 million. That deal helped to validate growing interest and use of open source software in enterprise storage, which is one of the few areas of enterprise IT where open source has yet to achieve significant acceptance and penetration.
It also bolstered Red Hat's ascent in enterprise cloud computing and plays a significant role in its strategy on OpenStack, which is helping to fuel community and credibility for Ceph.
Red Hat's 2011 acquisition of Gluster, for $136 million, marked the company's movement into scale-out storage and the cloud, as well as the beginning of its integration and collaboration with OpenStack, which is now among Red Hat's top strategic initiatives.
As evidenced by its recent earnings call, OpenStack represents a small but fast-growing source of revenue for Red Hat. After being positioned against the open source cloud project just a few years ago, it is now all-in on OpenStack.
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Red Hat's Acquisition-Fueled Climb to the Cloud
Anyone who has been involved with security knows there is a balance to providing both security and privacy and performance at the same time. Security is often blamed for performance woes, particularly when cryptography is involved.
SSL and TLS have long addressed this balance by leveraging custom-built hardware to enhance the performance of the most taxing components of these protocols: session setup. The "easy" part of securing communications (if one can use easy with respect to cryptography) is bulk encryption. While certainly more taxing on performance than clear text, relative to the more complex and compute intensive process of the handshaking required to set up such sessions, easy is an appropriate term.
Moore's Law is often cited as providing the increases in computer power necessary to offset the performance tax imposed by secure protocols. Unfortunately while this would be true if all other factors remained constant, the reality is that other factors are also changing and impose additional burdens on the protocol that often negate the gains made by Moore's Law. Key lengths, for example, continue to grow to combat the increase in compute power that makes it easier to brute-force crack a cryptographic key and new challenges with respect to privacy are changing the frequency with which those keys are generated.. There are also occasionally leaps in the mathematic realm that find ways to more quickly compute the hard problem that the cryptographic algorithm uses, but those are rare and dont march at the steady pace that compute power increases do.
PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy), for example, has been offered as a way to combat potential snooping by third-parties (read: governments) by requiring the generation of ephemeral (short lived) keys for each new session. This has the effect of imposing an extra cryptography tax" on communications over and above the already expensive handshaking process required by secure protocols like SSL.
Accompanying the introduction of PFS has been a move to take advantage of ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography). One of the primary benefits of ECC is that it can provide comparable security with shorter key lengths to RSA with longer key lengths. When you're generating ephemeral keys on a per-session or per-message basis, the shorter key length helps reduce the burden imposed by the additional cryptographic functions.
Now, the problem is that cryptography is still compute intense and even leveraging ECC for PFS you're still going to incur performance penalties in setting up the session. Certainly custom cryptographic hardware acceleration would be a boon, but in cases where software-only solutions are desired, this is problematic. So the question is, how do you support enhanced security with PFS and ECC while still achieving blazing fast performance and extreme capacity?
Obviously I'm about to tell you, so read on...
Next-Generation Cryptography
LineRate achieves what sounds like the impossible: really fast, really scalable secure communications in a software solution deployed on commodity hardware.
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Stronger Keys and Faster Security with ECC
Julian Assange Endorses Bitcoin (James L. Paris)
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Julian Assange Endorses Bitcoin (James L. Paris) - Video