Monthly Archives: September 2014

Open-source project promises easy-to-use encryption for email, instant messaging and more

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A software development project launched Monday aims to create free tools that simplify the encryption of online forms of communication like email, instant messaging, SMS and more by solving the complexity associated with the exchange and management of encryption keys.

Called Pretty Easy Privacy (PEP), the projects goal is to integrate the technology with existing communication tools on different desktop and mobile platforms. The development team launched a preview PEP implementation Monday for the Microsoft Outlook email client, but plans to build similar products to encrypt communications in Android, iOS, Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Jabber, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and Twitter.

The PEP developers launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise funds that would allow them to set up a foundation to support the project and speed up the development of the various implementations for different platforms.

While most PEP software will be released under the GNU General Public License version 3 and will be free to use, the team will also develop business products that will be commercialized through a new Luxembourg-based company called PEP Security.

The PEP engine relies on existing open-source technologies like GnuPG, an implementation of the OpenPGP encryption standard; GNUnet, a framework for decentralized, peer-to-peer networking; and NetPGP, an OpenPGP implementation for platforms like iOS, where GnuPG is not supported. However, its primary goal is to provide no hassle privacy through a zero-touch user experience, according to its developers.

On installation PEP automatically generates encryption keys for the user or imports them from a local PGP client. It is also able to discover the keys for the users communication partners if they uploaded them on public keyservers or already sent signed emails in the past. This means PEP will start encrypting communications straight away with some users and works even if the other side doesnt use PEP, but other PGP, S/MIME or CMS implementations.

The PEP engine is doing exactly what a hacker does when he or she is using PGP: create a good keypair with reliable algorithms, handle it safely, manage public keys of other people, and operate the crypto solution in the best known way to keep it safe, said Volker Birk, a German software architect and one of the projects founders, in a blog post.

The PEP plug-in for Outlook uses color-coded trust indicators for email contacts. The default one is grey and signifies that encrypted communication is not yet possible with the selected contact. When the recipients keys are known and already in the keystore, the trust indicator switches to yellow, which means encrypted communication is possible, but potentially vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

In order to achieve the highest level of protection, signaled by a green indicator, the two parties need to exchange PEP-generated safe words over the phone. Once this handshake is confirmed, the communication is protected against all known attacks, the PEP developers said on the projects Indiegogo page.

The technology does not rely on centralized infrastructure and uses peer-to-peer technology for anonymous transport. When both parties use it, its not just the content of messages that get encrypted, but metadata like the subject line in the case of emails.

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Open-source project promises easy-to-use encryption for email, instant messaging and more

Facebook’s TODO project is a big push to evolve the world of open source

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Facebook has partnered with several large companies to kick off a new project called TODO that aims to improve the way open source software is developed and consumed.

Facebook, Google and many other big businesses have come to rely on open source projects, such as the MySQL database, to run their businesses, and particularly their online operations.

But they apparently feel theres room to improve how open source projects are managed and organized, and even room to improve the software itself. The TODO projectwhich stands for Talk Openly, Develop Openlyaddresses those goals.

We want to figure out how we can raise the bar on the quality of open-source software projects in the world, Jay Parikh, the head of Facebooks infrastructure group, said at a conference in San Francisco Monday.

The TODO project aims to make it easier for a company or organization to get started with using an open source package, and also make it easier to kick off new open source development projects.

The group consists mainly of the biggest online service providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google and Box. It also includes Walmart Labs, Dropbox, Khan Academy, Stripe, Square and the open source software repository GitHub and others.

TODO is a new open source collaboration formed to address the challenges that companies have encountered in consuming open source software and running open source programs, Facebook said in a statement.

Separately on Monday, Facebook said it will open-source mcrouter, a memcached protocol router that Facebook uses to handle all traffic between its caching servers.

At peak massive scale, mcrouter handles close to five billion requests per second, the company said. More information can be found in the blog post here.

Facebook made its announcements at its @Scale conference, which brings together companies that operate at Web scale to talk about how they run their operations.

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Facebook's TODO project is a big push to evolve the world of open source

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Softarex Technologies Announces Collaboration in the Healthcare Technology Industry

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Alexandria, VA (PRWEB) September 12, 2014

Softarex Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce that they have become a member of the Open Health Tools (OHT) community in May 2014. Open Health Tools is an open source community of software developers that designs and develops open standards based technology that meets interoperability requirements for early adopters. With this membership we are able to successfully participate in developing open source software for the community.

We are proud to be a part of the Open Health Tools community, which combines major health providers from different countries and regions, health professionals, health standards organizations, vendors, as well as open source developers, said Sergei Dubograev, Vice President of Softarex Technologies Inc. Its a great opportunity to share and implement all the profound experience our team has gained in years of developing software for the healthcare industry. We are excited to focus together with other OHT open source developers on developing Health Information Platforms of frameworks, exemplary tools and reference applications that make it easy and cost effective to build and deploy software in todays connected and unconnected world.

One of the main goals of Open Health Tools is to combine open standards programs, open source development, multiple cooperating vendors and major health consumers into successful software technology deliverables.

ABOUT SOFTAREX TECHNOLOGIES INC. Softarex Technologies Inc. delivers world-class custom software solutions and new innovative software products. Softarexs development team has more than 20 years of experience enabling complex IT solutions across a wide range of industries. Our engineers, some of the best in the world, have a high-level of expertise in Healthcare, Multimedia, Communications, e-Learning and Manufacturing. Our specialists have collected a vast knowledgebase of expertise for the development of different systems. They are not only capable of developing software code, but they are proficient in the implementation of specialized algorithms, and the mathematical models used when defining new software.

ABOUT OHT Open Health Tools (http://www.openhealthtools.org) was formed and announced in 2007 with the vision to enable a ubiquitous ecosystem where members of the Health and IT professions can collaborate to build open, standards-based interoperable systems that enable patients and their care providers to have access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed.

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Softarex Technologies Announces Collaboration in the Healthcare Technology Industry