WhatsApp users should switch to a more secure messaging service now that it is being bought by Facebook, a German data protection commissioner urged Thursday.

Facebook announced on Wednesday that it plans to acquire WhatsApp, a mobile messaging service with about 450 million monthly users, for $12 billion in shares, $4 billion in cash as well as $3 billion in stock options. The deal could raise important data protection issues because the personal data of its users will likely be merged with Facebook data, said Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. When communication metadata and content of both services is merged, it can be used for profiling and commercially exploited for advertising purposes, Weichert said.

On Data Protection day 2014, Vice-President Reding called for a "data protection compact for Europe" - eight principles that should govern the way data is processed by the public and the private sector.

Two years after the European Commission proposed a major reform of the EU’s data protection rules, Vice-President Reding called for full speed on data protection in 2014, saying "Europe must act decisively to establish a robust data protection framework that can be the gold standard for the world. Otherwise others will move first and impose their standards on us." Speaking about national security programmes and their implications for data protection, Vice-President Reding said it is essential that Europe get its own house in order. "National security should be invoked sparingly.

The Chaos Computer Congress is the largest offline hacker gathering in Europe. Over 9000 people came to Hamburg between Christmas and New Years Eve to attend talks, discuss, meet up with like-minded folk, hack, make and rejoice in the abundance of LEDs.

It being a hacker conference there was a high DIY level. The congress was organized and run by volunteers called Angels, self-organized sessions outnumbered the talks of the main program and groups organized in Assemblies to create a home base in the sea of people. The Congress Center Hamburg building was completely pimped, its CCH logo hacked to read CCC, a temporary night club was built up on the ground floor (with working water canon!) and the congress’ rocket logo came to life in front of the entrance.

Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening – yes, with a microphone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data.

The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware. The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you’re a secret agent, power user, or some other kind of encryption-using miscreant, you may want to reach for the Rammstein when decrypting your data. This acoustic cryptanalysis, carried out by Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir (who co-invented RSA), and Eran Tromer, uses what’s known as a side channel attack. A side channel is an attack vector that is non-direct and unconventional, and thus hasn’t been properly secured. 

In an e-mail sent to BSD project leader Theo de Raadt, former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry has claimed that NETSEC developers helped the FBI plant "a number of backdoors" in the OpenBSD cryptographic framework approximately a decade ago.

Perry says that his nondisclosure agreement with the FBI has expired, allowing him to finally bring the issue to the attention of OpenBSD developers. Perry also suggests that knowledge of the FBI's backdoors played a role in DARPA's decision to withdraw millions of dollars of grant funding from OpenBSD in 2003. "This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon the same."

The problem with encrypted email is that it’s hard to use – if it weren’t, everyone would be using it. So rather than mucking around with encryption keys, they’re using services like Gmail, which leave their messages open for reading if an intelligence agency is secretly tapping the provider’s fiber, or if law enforcement comes knocking at the front door.

This is why the Dark Mail project, which ended its Kickstarter campaign comfortably past the $196,608 goal late Wednesday, is so intriguing. It represents the evolution of two notable secure email schemes that shut themselves down in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, Lavabit and as such it’s got some hefty talent running the show.

Google is stepping up efforts to toughen data encryption in an effort to limit unofficial snooping on user information in the wake of the revelations about the NSA and PRISM. Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google said "It's an arms race", as he described government hackers as "among the most skilled players in this game."

In the aftermath of leaked documents from Edward Snowden, suggesting that some US companies have made it easy for information to flow to the government, Google is keen to show it is doing its utmost to protect its users' privacy. The company, that it would still have to comply with any legally approved Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests and would hand over data whenever obligated to. 

At the moment we are at one of the most important stages of our product development – the choice and implementation of encryption algorithms. The main goal of SafeUM secure messenger is its users' personal data and correspondence safety.

The primary task of  SafeUM is to protect privacy, information and data integrity of our users.

We used symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and El Gamal Public key encryption as basic ones. We want to make security a core idea surrounded by other messenger features. We also would like to give you the opportunity to control the security levels on your own.

Wikipedia is taking steps to make its site ‘unsnoopable’ to the NSA following revelations that its site users were being spied on. The measures will include the use of secure encryption for its logged-in users to minimize eavesdropping. 

The non-profit US-based organization that manages Wikipedia, Wikimedia, has released a statement, announcing the introduction of HTTPS security protocol on its website to protect its visitors. Wikipedia believes strongly in protecting the privacy of its readers and editors. Recent leaks of the NSA’s XKeyscore program have prompted our community members to push for the use of HTTPS by default for the Wikimedia projects. 

It is possible with the help of "Back up my data" in a mobile operating system. The co-worker of the “Elecontric  Frontier Foundation” Micah Lee announced that the function "Back up my data" in OS Android sends passwords from Wi-Fi and private information in plaintext to Google.

"Since backup and restore is such a useful feature, and since it's turned on by default, it's likely that the vast majority of Android users are syncing this data with their Google accounts. Because Android is so popular, it's likely that Google has plaintext Wi-Fi passwords for the majority of users,” Lee pointed out.