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The Linux Foundation's recently published security checklist may draw more attention to best practices for protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of its recommendations. Konstantin Ryabitsev, the foundation's director of collaborative IT services, developed the list for th...

The death of online privacy had already been proclaimed long before Edward Snowden landed in the international spotlight, but if it wasn't confirmed back then, Snowden's NSA revelations surely must have extinguished the last vestiges of hope in even the most die-hard optimists. "We're in a predicame...

Well Linux bloggers have made it plain from the get-go that privacy is among their top concerns for 2014, and recent events have done nothing to shift that focus. President Obama's momentous speech proposing NSA reforms wasn't the only clarion call last week. We also heard from Mozilla, which appeal...

The Tibetan government, law firms in Thailand and human rights groups in Sudan are all using a relatively new encrypted communications tool -- one that fits easily, if not cheaply, onto your smartphone. Silent Circle is an encrypted voice, video, text and file-transfer protocol that's available in a...

Open source security products do not generally carry the same following as their business suite and operating system brethren. However, the same reasons for supporting open source products in general also apply to open source security applications. Open source security applications are free, or at l...

Mozilla on Tuesday released the latest version of its popular Firefox open-source Web browser and its e-mail client. The release marks the second time in eight days the company has issued fixes. Firefox 1.0.6 is a stability update that restores API compatibility for extensions and Web applications t...

A developer of security software for Linux had some harsh words yesterday for what he sees as a lax attitude toward security in the operating system's community. "Linux is being presented by commercial vendors as a professional, enterprise-ready product," Brad Spengler, of grsecurity, said. "When it...

At this week's Crypto 2004 conference in California, several papers were presented that demonstrated vulnerabilities in algorithms that are often used to create digital signatures. Although the results are preliminary, many in the security community are concerned about what such weaknesses might mea...