End to end encryption

Using Filevault on a Mac encrypts the entire hard drive and helps protect personal data from theft or unauthorized snooping. It’s a great security feature that many users enable when they’re first setting up their Mac, but some users may enable it or disable it later as well. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but if you enable FileVault at a later date it may take longer to encrypt the disk as more data must be encrypted. Accordingly, it can be helpful to check the progress of FileVault disk encryption to know how far along the encryption or decryption process is. How to Check FileVault Encryption Progress from the Command Line Assuming you have recently enabled FileVault and it is now encrypting a disk, or you have disabled FileVault and the disk is now decrypting… Open the Terminal app found in /Applications/Utilities/ Enter the following command string diskutil cs list Look for “Conversion Progress:” in the command output to see what the … [Read more...] about How to View FileVault Progress When Encrypting a Mac Disk

Lavabit is a secure and encrypted email platform that has been getting a lot of attention lately in light of recent news events. Lavabit aims to prevent reductions of privacy, and so not only does Lavabit have excellent antispam and antivirus features along with your standard email niceties like autoresponders, its most relevant feature at the moment is the usage of SSL and asymmetric encryption for incredibly secured email communications. Here’s the brief description of Lavabits security features, but for those truly interested you can read more here : How does asymmetric encryption protect your privacy? The short description is that for users of this feature, incoming e-mail messages are encrypted before they’re saved onto our servers. Once a message has been encrypted, only someone who has the account password can decrypt the message. Like all safety measures, encryption is only effective if it’s used. To ensure privacy, Lavabit has developed a complex system that makes the … [Read more...] about How to Set Up Lavabit Secure & Encrypted Email on the iPhone and iPad

A password manager can make life a great deal easier. Rather than having to remember increasingly complex login details for a myriad of apps and sites, you simply use one solitary password to access the manager app itself, which then takes care of the rest. They can also create new, complex passwords for your accounts; ones that will be far more secure than the current combination of birthdays, pets and children's names that you might be using. We've gathered together a selection of the current offerings for iPhone (we've got a separate article about Mac password managers ), any of which will take your security up several levels. If you're also interested in making your iPhone browsing more secure, then check out our Best VPN for iPhone guide. What is a password manager? As the name suggests, these apps are a way to manage the account details for any app or service you use online. They act as a secure repository for the login IDs and passwords for each site, all of … [Read more...] about Best password managers for iPhone

WhatsApp has officially called off the planned forced update for 8 February 2021. The company, which belongs to Facebook, appears to have reached the decision in response to widespread confusion and dissatisfaction among users. WhatsApp wanted to change the data protection and usage rules on 8 February; users had to agree to the new rules by that date or their account would have been deleted. Users were required to agree that WhatsApp could share certain data, under certain circumstances, with Facebook. Following the initial wave of unhappiness caused by the announcement, experts looked more closely and concluded that the changes weren't as bad as they sounded . But the way the changes were communicated caused confusion and criticism and gave rival messengers such as Signal and Telegram a rush of new users; Telegram for one has taken this opportunity to add the ability to import WhatsApp chats , a handy feature for those switching app. (Telegram, incidentally, has been … [Read more...] about WhatsApp announces U-turn: No privacy changes (for now)

If you think of all your home's lights, climate controls and automation gadgets as a sort of Russian Nesting Doll , you start to understand Apple HomeKit and its database-driven approach to home automation. See also: The 18 Most Important Features in iOS 8 During a HomeKit introduction session at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference ( WWDC ) in San Francisco on Tuesday, an Apple engineer described how virtually every home, room, device, function and setting would have a name in the HomeKit system and how Siri, Apple’s intelligent voice assistant, could recognize and let you control it all thanks to a common database. Apple’s overarching goal is to bring “some rationality to home automation,” said the Apple engineer. To do so, the HomeKit iOS 8 app and API both guide the user through the distinct naming of every room and device, but can also, if the accessories support Apple's Home Automation Protocol and iOS devices, intuit home automation device capabilities. … [Read more...] about Inside Apple’s Plan to Automate Your Home