Encryption

Even if you're using IMAP to access your email, certain newer email clients like Thunderbird 3 and Postbox will download and store your emails locally in plain text. This leaves many users making a difficult choice between leaving sensitive data unencrypted, or venturing into overkill territory by using a tool like FileVault, PGP Whole Disk Encryption or TrueCrypt - which see you encrypting your entire home directory or hard drive and dealing with a performance overhead. This article will show you how to encrypt only your Postbox email on a Mac, but can easily be adapted to other email clients (or other folders like your Documents folder). Read More

The accidental loss or deliberate theft of notebooks with drives full of sensitive information is not just the cause of red faces (or worse) for government or military officials around the globe, as the world of business has also been touched by such security breaches. Self-encrypting drives have done much to help lock down important files, but Toshiba has gone a step further by developing a technology that securely erases data rather than let it fall into unauthorized hands. Originally announced last August, Wipe Technology has now been incorporated into a new range of self-encrypting hard drives which will go into mass production at the end of June. Read More

As any reader of detective fiction will tell you, no two fingerprints are alike. The similarly unique physical structure of microchips could help manufacturers protect their products from piracy, thanks to research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology. The team has developed technology that makes use of slight variations generated during manufacture to produce unique, clone-proof digital fingerprints. Read More

In the crowded digital camera market, camera makers are continually pushing pixel counts higher and higher to attract consumers who have been led to believe that, the more pixels, the better the image. Proving that this is not necessarily the case, a team of researchers from Spain’s UJI (Universitat Jaume I) Optics Research Group (GROC) has developed a sensor of just one pixel with the ability to record high quality images. Read More

Quantum cryptography has been around since the 1980's but up until now only very small packets of information have been able to be encrypted at one time. Now a breakthrough that identifies the angle and rotation of photon particles is taking this technology to the next level. Read More

At the Toorcon 12 hacker conference in San Diego on Sunday, Seattle programmer Eric Butler introduced his Firesheep add-on for the Firefox Web browser in an effort to bring attention to the weakness of open Wi-Fi networks. In a practice known as HTTP session hijacking (or “sidejacking”) the add-on intercepts browser cookies used by many sites, including Facebook and Twitter, to identify users and allows anyone running the program to log in as the legitimate user and do anything that user can do on a particular website. Read More

For most people the name Lockheed Martin relates to missiles, rockets, simulators, robotics, satellites, aircraft and advanced military systems but look up the company’s “about us” page on the global web site, and you’ll see that the 140,000 LM employees who bring in around US$43 billion in revenues each year, see themselves as working for a security company. Which might serve as some degree of confidence that the company’s new IronClad “PC on a stick” USB drive offers military-strength security for their out-of-office computing. The IronClad shrinks a laptop’s hard drive, including the entire operating system, software applications, and files, onto a fully encrypted flash drive - a “PC on a stick” that delivers hardware-level protection against today’s most insidious malware threats, and it costs way less than a Longbow helicopter, a Cassini satellite, Titan rocket or SR-71 Blackbird. Read More

LaCie has unveiled the CooKey and WhizKey, two new USB keys inspired by the award-winning iamaKey, both featuring the water- and scratch-resistant gold SIP connectors of their inspiration. The USB keys are available in sizes from 4GB to 32GB, and all include 4GB of online storage with LaCie's Wuala service. Read More

Opera's powerful content sharing technology, Unite, has now been fully integrated into its desktop browser with the release of Opera 10.10. Opera lovers can also enjoy visual tabs to view thumbnails of pages in open tabs, a page-loading turbo boost, web navigation with mouse gestures and a customizable speed dial interface. Read More