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GnuPGP still has many important uses today.

Most people have never heard of the software that makes up the machinery of the internet. Outside developer circles, its authors receive little reward for their efforts, in terms of either money or public recognition.

One example is the encryption software GNU Privacy Guard (also known as GnuPG and GPG), and its authors are regularly forced to fundraise to continue the project.

GnuPG is part of the GNU collection of free and open source software, but its story is an interesting one, and it begins with software engineer Phil Zimmermann.

We do not know exactly what Zimmermann felt on January 11, 1996, but relief is probably a good guess. The United States government had just ended its investigation into him and his encryption software, PGP or Pretty Good Privacy.

In the 1990s, the US restricted the export of strong cryptography, viewing it as sensitive technology that had once been the exclusive purview of the intelligence and military establishment. Zimmermann had been facing serious punishment for posting PGP on the internet in 1991, which could have been seen as a violation of the Arms Export Control Act.

To circumvent US export regulations and ship the software legally to other countries, hackers even printed the source code as a book, which would allow anyone to scan it at its destination and rebuild the software from scratch.

Zimmermann later worked with the PGP Corporation, which helped define PGP as an open internet standard, OpenPGP. A number of software packages implement this standard, of which GnuPG is perhaps the best-known.

PGP implements a form of cryptography that is known as asymmetric cryptography or public-key cryptography.

The story of its discovery is itself worth telling. It was invented in the 1970s by researchers at the British intelligence service GCHQ and then again by Stanford University academics in the US, although GCHQs results were only declassified in 1997.

Asymmetric cryptography gives users two keys. The so-called public key is meant to be distributed to everyone and is used to encrypt messages or verify a signature. The private or secret key must be known only to the user. It helps decrypt messages or sign them - the digital equivalent of a seal to prove origin and authenticity.

Zimmermann published PGP because he believed that everybody has a right to private communication. PGP was meant to be used for email, but could be used for any kind of electronic communication.

Despite Zimmermanns work, the dream of free encryption for everyone never quite came to full bloom.

Neither Zimmermanns original PGP nor the later GnuPG managed to become entirely user-friendly. Both use highly technical language, and the latter is still known for being accessible only by typing out commands - an anachronism even in the late 1990s, when most operating systems already used the mouse.

Many users did not understand why they should encrypt their email at all, and attempts to integrate the tools with email clients were not particularly intuitive.

Big corporations such as Microsoft, Google and Apple shunned it to this day, they do not ship PGP with their products, although some are now implementing forms of end-to-end encryption.

Finally, there was the issue of distributing public keys - they had to be made available to other people to be useful. Private initiatives never gathered much attention. In fact, a number of academic studies in the early and late 2000s showed that these attempts never managed to attract widespread public usage.

The release of the Edward Snowden documents in 2013 spurred renewed interest in PGP. Crypto parties became a global phenomenon when people met in person to exchange their public keys, but this was ultimately short-lived.

When I met Zimmermann in Silicon Valley in 2015, he admitted that he did not currently use PGP. In a more recent email, he said this is because it does not run on current versions of macOS or iOS. I may soon run GnuPG, he wrote.

By todays standards, GnuPG like all implementations of OpenPGP lacks additional security features that are provided by chat apps such as WhatsApp or Signal. Both are spiritual descendants of PGP and unthinkable without Zimmermanns invention, but they go beyond what OpenPGP can do by protecting messages even in the case of a private key being lost.

Whats more, email reveals the sender and receiver names anyway. In the age of data mining, this is often enough to infer the contents of encrypted communication.

Nevertheless, GnuPG (and hence OpenPGP) are alive and well. Relative to the increased computational power available today, their cryptography is as strong today as it was in 1991. GnuPG just found new use cases - very important ones.

Journalists use it to allow their sources to deposit confidential data and leaks. This is a vital and indispensable method of self-protection for the leaker and the journalist.

But even more importantly, digital signatures are where GnuPG excels today.

Linux is one of the worlds most common operating system (it even forms the basis of Android). On internet servers that run Linux, software is downloaded and updated from software repositories - and most of them sign their software with GnuPG to confirm its authenticity and origin.

GnuPG works its magic behind closed curtains, once again.

Read the rest here:
A brief history of GnuPG: vital to online security but free and underfunded - The Conversation AU

Seattle, Washington-based BloomAPI has raised $2.4 million for its medical records processing software. Y Combinator, Slow Ventures, Founders Co-Op, Section 32, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Parker Conrad all contributed to the round.

HIPAA allows anyone to ask for and receive their medical records. But EHR systems arent always designed with an elegant way to get records out of the system, leading to a status quo where records are often printed out and then faxed, mailed, or hand-delivered to patients, as well as to insurance companies that might need them.

BloomAPI is aiming to tackle that problem by installing a free software at practices that allows them to release records securely, easily, and electronically. The company has 300 doctors in its network currently and helps transmit records for more than a million patients.

While the software is free to providers and sits on their existing systems, BloomAPI makes money by selling access to its API to insurers and other vendors. That product is called ChartPull.

Interoperability between health records has long been a goal in healthcare, one that still seems a long way off. Whats interesting about the BloomAPI approach is that, rather than tackling the huge problem of enabling seamless data sharing between EHRs, the company is just trying to make the current status quo record requests a little more high-tech. While electronically requesting and transmitting records might not be as good as real data exchange, its still quite a bit better than printing and faxing.

This is the first round of funding for the company, and it will go toward hiring engineering, operations, and sales staff in the Seattle area.

Read more:
BloomAPI gets $2.4M to digitize records requests - MobiHealthNews

Microsoft has confirmed that upgrade licenses to Windows 10 Pro that businesses obtain from the free preview of Microsoft 365 Business (M365) will remain in place. That's true even if the customer doesn't transition to a paid plan.

Also, companies that do subscribe to new Windows/Office suite combo when it's available, then later cancel the subscription or otherwise exit the plan, will be allowed to retain the Windows 10 licenses.

"Customers will be able to keep their upgraded license to Windows 10," a company spokeswoman said in an email reply to questions about M365 Business, including the preview set to begin on Aug. 2.

The confirmation that customers will preserve their upgraded licenses means that Microsoft sees M365 Business as yet another way to get Windows 10 onto more PCs. More specifically, Microsoft probably views the plan as a foot in the door, a precursor to the customer subscribing to the more expensive and inclusive Microsoft 365 Enterprise.

"It may actually be an issue of upgrading from [Windows 10] Pro to [Microsoft 365] Enterprise (E3) to [Microsoft 365] Enterprise E5," wrote Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, in an email. "[Customers] need [Windows 10] Enterprise at the E5 level to get Defender Advanced Threat Protection."

A key component of the $20 per user per month M365 Business subscription is an upgrade to Windows 10 Pro from Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1 Pro. Windows 10 Pro is the least expensive business-grade edition, but the top-tiered version pre-installed on new PCs. (Windows 10 Enterprise, the most capable edition, is installed as an upgrade to Pro, usually by a firm's IT staff, on just-acquired PCs or those systems already in place.)

That upgrade is critical if customers are to get their money's worth from M365 Business: IT can manage Windows 10 devices only through the plan's control panel. While Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 can certainly run the Office 365 Business Premium suite of applications and services -- another major part of M365 Business -- equipping those machines with the latter would simply set fire to $7.50 per user per month (the difference between M365 Business and Office 365 Business Premium).

Letting customers retain the upgraded Windows 10 Pro licenses, even after bailing from the preview or dropping a subscription, will be in step with other Microsoft decisions regarding the version. The Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and E5 plans, as well as the just-renamed Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3 and E5 plans, also come with upgrades to Windows 10 Pro from Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1 Pro. The upgrades were, like those for M365 Business, permanent if customers departed the subscriptions.

"When a subscription license expires ... the Windows 10 Enterprise device seamlessly steps back down to Windows 10 Pro," Microsoft stated in a support document.

Microsoft has never given a reason for its largess, but one has been implied: By leaving the PCs running Windows 10 Pro, rather than forcing users to reinstall the original Windows 7 or 8.1, Microsoft makes it easier for customers to later renew a subscription and return to the rent-not-buy fold.

The company has repeatedly signaled that it is willing to give away upgrades to Windows 10 from Windows 7 (set to retire in January 2020) and Windows 8.1 (January 2023) as long as, first of all, it's certain those upgrades go only to business customers, not consumers, and second, that those business customers are, at some point, potential subscribers to the pricy Enterprise E3 or E5 plans.

Why?

Simply put, Microsoft's most serious software-as-a-subscription (SaaS) efforts have focused on increasingly costly plans, as evidenced by pushing Office 365 to the new, higher-priced E5 level, then in creating Windows Enterprise and M365 Enterprise. Thirteen months ago, Microsoft's priciest SaaS plan was the $35 per user per month Office 365 E5, which runs customers $420 annually for each covered employee. Now the company's top-line SaaS plan is Microsoft 365 Enterprise E5, whose predecessor cost around $54 per user per month, says ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, or $648 each year for each worker.

See the article here:
M365 Business means free Windows 10 upgrades, but for business only - Computerworld

The National Rifle Association targeted the Washington Post in a new video Monday, accusing the newspaper of "doing damage to the country" and promoting the "violent left."

The release of the video comes after the Post wrote a story last week about recent NRA videos that criticize Democratic politicians and the media, but do not focus on gun policy.

"They tell us to not have an opinion unless it's about guns," says conservative talk show host Grant Stinchfield, who narrates the new video attacking the Post. "Listen to me Washington Post. We talk about more than guns because every freedom is connected. If one is threatened, they all are threatened, and the organized anarchy that you, our politicians and you're activists are pushing is destroying our country."

Stinchfield went on to condemn the Post's slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," and said the newspaper "should say, "Journalism Dies at the Washington Post.'"

The Post wrote a story July 11 that mentions a recent NRA video released in late June featuring commentator Dana Loesch that received widespread criticism because it did not emphasize Second Amendment Rights.

In the video, Loesch described liberal demonstrators who "smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports bully and terrorize the law-abiding." A petition to have the Loesch video removed from Facebook argued that "the video tries to create an us-vs-them' narrative and pit Americans against one another."

Critics said the video exploited the congressional baseball shooting that had just happened prior to the video's release, in which five people were wounded, including House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., by an outspoken supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

The NRA is brushing off the criticism. In the new video, Stinchfield says the NRA "will never stop fighting the violent left on the battlefield of truth."

"Here's a suggestion for the Washington Post: don't worry about how many guns are in our videos, worry about how many facts are in your articles," Stinchfield said. "Because if gun owners abused our Second Amendment the way you abuse your paper and the First Amendment, our rights would have been taken away long ago. You people do more to damage our country with a keyboard than any NRA member has ever done combined with a firearm."

More:
NRA: Washington Post abuses First Amendment - Washington Examiner

The Latest on the migrant crisis in Europe (all times local):

10:40 p.m.

Italy's migrant crisis is spawning new protests, with a local mayor in Sicily leading a popular revolt to prevent a few dozen new arrivals from taking up residence in an abandoned hotel.

Vincenzo Lionetto, mayor of Castel'Umberto in Messina, wrote an "urgent and important" Facebook post advising residents that the local prefect had just informed him that the 30 or so migrants would be transferred to the Canguro hotel.

He led a dozen or so residents in surrounding the hotel with their cars Saturday, though the migrants apparently were already inside.

Tensions over migration are running high in Italy, with daily arrivals of new asylum-seekers and local officials complaining they don't have space to take them in. The issue is particularly sensitive with elections expected this year or next.

2:20 p.m.

Spain's maritime rescue service says that it has saved 19 migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in a small boat.

The service tells The Associated Press that all 19 migrants were men claiming Algerian nationality.

The boat was spotted late on Friday night, and rescuers reached it early on Saturday morning in waters off the southeastern coast of Spain.

Thousands of migrants from Africa attempt the perilous crossing to Europe in small boats that are unfit for the open sea and often launched by human smugglers

The rest is here:
Italy's migrant crisis is spawning new protests - ABC News