Why Data Encryption Continues to Be Secure

The New Yorker, of all ‘specialist’ tech magazines out there, has an article on “How the NSA Cracked the Web”!

What a surprise.

For starters, as the web isn’t encrypted in the first place, it cannot be ‘cracked’. Further down into the article — and after some extensive sorting out all the mis-understandings of its obviously computer-illiterate author — the reader is finally let in on that ‘cracking success’ of the NSA: it turns out to be pretty lame and, in fact, limited mostly to compromising Microsoft’s and some other commercial software vendors’ master keys.

This got nothing to do with real decryption or with ‘cracking’ or  any ‘code breaking’ whatsoever.

What’s noteworthy, though, is that it is admitted between the lines that all the “real” encryption technologies are as safe as always assumed (with e g 2048-bit keys still unbreakable). Therefore, applying these coupled with a few simple steps of protecting and securely hosting any content one might have out on the public internet continues to be the way to go.

At the end of the day, the so-called ‘spectacular success’ of the NSA does nothing more than illustrate why:

  • Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server software) is insecure (a fact widely known since 10+ years),
  • Windows in particular (and to a lesser extent Apple OS X) contains government backdoors and is less secure than peer-reviewed Open Source operating systems,
  • wLAN setups can never be fully secured (a fact known throughout the IT Security industry since wLANs exist and now re-enforced),
  • mobile communications as well as wLAN technologies are never secure (nor healthy for the user, both facts are known but usually disputed by the industry in order to sell their stuff)
  • common sense is still superior to “intelligence” (as in military etc)
  • all industrial-strength and professional encryption and IT security measures are effective

From the last bullet point it is obvious that encryption tachnologies, in fact, are so effective the NSA and U. S. federal government have stupid media outlets publish their rubbish in order to “win back territory” by means of psychological warfare instead of embarking on the — next to impossible — journey of cracking Phil Zimmerman’s PGP encryption or any of the derivative technologies like GPG (GnuPG) or openPGP. (Read our upcoming separate article on how to obtain these open source tools, for FREE, and what basic measures to take in order to make illegal government surveillance as well as data theft as hard as possible.)

Credit Cards: Over 41% of Total Revenue Going to “Fraud Prevention”

Credit card issuing companies are spending upward of 41% of total revenue every year on — more or less futile anyway — attempts to prevent (or at least limit) credit card fraud. This is a well-known fact throughout the banking and credit card industries.

Outdated Infrastructure

Largely anachronistic money transfer systems such as credit cards but also bank wire transfer technologies, dating from the age of the telegraph but still in use today, prove increasingly unfit for today’ where much more frequently than in pre-internet days some sort of “overseas” aspect is present.

High Extra Cost Consumers Have to Pay

Despite the high extra cost thus associated with all “international” transactions, a large percentage of transactions in the consumer and B2C fields alone involve a “foreign” party in today’s world. These “overseas” transactions are particularly prone to fraud or other kinds of loss as legacy systems used by banks were not designed to process the volume of worldwide transfers they have to in this day and age.

Making It Worse: the Only “Features” That Are New

Banks’ only “innovation” offered is the reckless integration of useless, and even more risky, new features into retails customer credit cards such as NFC (near-field communications). This makes the unsuitability of both credit cards and banks themselves for the real world even more obvious. All “new” NFC-equipped cards can be read at points of sale without card terminal contact, a fact that is already frequently used for cracking into and fraudulently charging to cards located in bags and wallets of passers-by.

Will Be Worse in the Future

Therefore, it is quite likely that these 41% will increase even further, unless a fundamental shift in the technologies employed takes place — even as established banks appear to see very little reason to finally offer their customers appropriate, modernised tools and business models.

Much rather, it will be “business as usual”: banks will roll all their costs (and losses) over to the “stupid little customer” who, in their view, is only “there to be milked” (or slaughtered). If you feel insecure about using NFC-enabled debit or credit cards, send them back to your bank and ask for a replacement without that “feature”. It might even make your “usage fees” lower in the long run.

Why MEGA Cloud Storage Is Also Great for Traders

MEGA offers a one-of-its-kind solution for securing your stored files, whether for personal or business use. The cloud-storage platform comes with a free Starter Plan, and there are also numerous paid-for plans that scale up to both power users and commercial use requirements.

MEGA Cloud Storage Compares Extremely Favorably

It’s the much better (and smarter option) than, say, Google Drive or Dropbox. (Read up on Privacy basics here if you didn’t know that and need to look up why Dropbox/AmazonS3 is not really a good idea.)

Better than Dropbox, Google Drive: MEGA cloud file storage

It is also worth mentioning that the MEGA secure storage platform seamlessly integrates with a wide range of devices, including NAS devices like QNAP and Synology, and has browser apps as well as standalone apps for all major operating systems. MEGA also offers MEGAcmd, a very neat command-line tool, to address the needs of IT professionals or programmers as well.

What Traders Can Do with MEGA a Cloud Storage Account

For marketers, MEGA Secure Cloud Storage offers a great alternative to much-hated Google Drive and Dropbox — both of which are infamous for their surveillance and lack of real control over user data. (To learn more about these concerns, read DuckDuckGo’s educational articles on Privacy and how to use alternatives to Google products in order to claim back your legitimate self-control over your data on the internet.) MEGA Secure Cloud Storage convincingly and masterfully addresses these concerns and offers an alternative option for all of us who want to be in charge ourselves (rather than any corporations, governments or faceless entities so wholly unrelated to us).

Storing Your Trading Data or Other Content with MEGA

With MEGA Secure Cloud Storage, it is easy to store your Lead Magnet or Free Downloads or other materials online. Simply link to your storage location, and your users and sign-up followers or anyone you want to share files with if you have an automatic onboarding process for your new users. (Or you can do it manually, if we’re talking smaller numbers of fellow traders or similar here.)

MEGA Secure Storage is a great offer from the New-Zealand-based startup that had been founded by Kim Dotcom when he came to the country in search for greener pastures.

MEGA Is Secure (Unlike Most of the Others)!

MEGA offers a unique safety feature where encrypted files — that cannot even be accessed by the company’s tech people — can be safely shared across the internet, including unsafe (unencrypted) simple emails or mobile text messages if need be. This is achieved by cleverly dividing the stored file’s URL into a public part and a private-key part that can be disguised or can be sent separately for security reasons.

Give it a try and see for yourself how this works!

Apple Pushing a Proprietary Payments System for iOS

Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) have removed a number of Bitcoin-related iOS applications from their proprietary online App Store. While in some cases, Apple failed to even give a proper reason for their move, other app developers have received notifications from Apple , Inc. that Bitcoin payment functionality, in a stricter sense, needed to be removed for apps to stay “acceptable” for Apple’s platform.

The measure taken by Apple, Inc. has resulted in the extinction of usable payment applications for Bitcoin on Apple iOS devices such as iPhone, iPad or iPod touch for the time being. Only a few apps that show just Bitcoin wallet balances or general prices on Bitcoin exchanges continue to be “permissible” for Apple. The company have, therefore, censored all truly useful Bitcoin applications for the widely used Apple devices out of existence.

This is yet another attempt at a proprietary, corporate-run, centrally-controlled system instead of using state-of-the-art technology, which is decentralized Crypto and private blockchains to deliver decentralized consensus and overall payments operations worldwide at low cost.

This kind of corporate policy has infuriated a large number of mobile device users. As a short-term result, a number of fixes for the problems caused by unavailable official App Store programs supporting full Bitcoin payments functionality have already appeared. Most prominent among these is … These are only functional on jail-broken iOS devices though. (“Jail breaking” means removing existing and re-installing modified versions of the operating system onto original devices in order to circumvent DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) technologies present in standard Apple items.)

Apple, Inc. have a vested interest in electronic payments systems. The reason for Apple fighting Bitcoin is that the company appears to be determined to introduce their own payments system for Apple mobile devices. Apple’s planned system is said to be designed for PoS payments (point-of-sale payments) and to also be suitable for small or micro payments useful, for example, for downloading music or movies from Apple’s proprietary iTunes platform.

Forcing users to not use Bitcoin seems to be “okay” then for a large corporation trying to, obviously increasingly desperately, introduce something they see as the next big thing into the market predominantly for their own good, not the users’ who would certainly benefit much more from using low-cost and reliable Crypto currency payments such as Bitcoin.

Secured Payments Worldwide

Forget about PayPal, forget about Credit Cards, forget about that 19th century dinosaur system S.W.I.F.T sending paper currency using a technology that’s outdated and almost 200 years old. What’s needed is something to help you re-gain control, something cutting out the middleman, particularly banks and their organizations co-operating diligently to siphon off percentages from EVERY transaction. Get rid of the financial Cosa Nostra like credit card companies or PayPal.

The Technology Is Here

The technology is here to put yourself in the driver’s seat, we just need to use it by analyzing the current situation intelligently and deploying appropriate tools and de-centralized control.