SpiderOak's Warrant Canary Died

BoingBoing has the story. I have never quite trusted the idea of a warrant canary. But here it seems to have worked. Presumably, if SpiderOak wanted to replace the warrant canary with a transparency report, they would have written something explaining their decision. To have it simply disappear i...

Reddit Removes NSL Warrant Canary from Transparency Report

Reddit’s latest transparency report is missing a nugget of information that was present in a previous report. Last year’s report included a warrant canary which stated that as of Jan. 29, 2015, Reddit had never received a National Security Letter, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order or...

TrueCrypt Audit Cryptanalysis Handed Off to NCC Group

The stagnant TrueCrypt audit stirred to life in the last 24 hours with the announcement that the second phase of the audit, tasked with examining the cryptography behind the open source disk encryption software, will begin shortly. NCC Group’s Cryptography Services has been contracted to do the...

Cheezburgers, Warrant Canaries and Cat Memes

Surveillance, privacy and security are serious subjects. So too, for some people, are cat memes and GIFs of screaming goats. And Cheezburger Inc., the premier purveyor of said memes and GIFs, wants its users to know that the company is standing up for their rights. The folks at Cheezburger have...

Of TrueCrypt and the Warrant Canary

Apple’s first transparency report, released last November, was one in a string of many released following the start of the Snowden leaks by technology companies trying to distance themselves from the tentacles of NSA surveillance. Apple’s report, however, contained two sentences that made it stan...