Citizen Four posted March 2015

I just watched the documentary about Snowden. It was pretty stressing to see the events unfold from his point of view. You can download on Cryptome

The part where Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, talks out is pretty intense.

Apple rejects Signal 2 from the appstore posted March 2015

EDIT: the tweet has been deleted, no news about what happened

There was a lot of talks about Signal 2, a messaging app that was doing end-to-end encryption on iOS.

It seems like Apple is not going to allow that:

WTF Apple?! They are rejecting Signal 2.0.1 because we are doing privacy-friendly bloom filter contact intersection.

@Frederic Jacobs

--

A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not, thus a Bloom filter has a 100% recall rate. In other words, a query returns either "possibly in set" or "definitely not in set". Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with a "counting" filter). The more elements that are added to the set, the larger the probability of false positives.

Bloom Filter on Wikipedia

Hacking Week CTF starting April the 3rd posted March 2015

One of my professor is organizing a CTF, it's in french (sorry), it will start next month and should last for a week, and... there might be a challenge I've made for them =). I don't know if it has been accepted but here you go: HackingWeek 2015 if you are interested and you can speak french

Top news in 60 seconds from NakedSecurity posted March 2015

A nice recap of the week in 60seconds thanks to Naked Security

Starfighter posted March 2015

Thomas Ptacek had left Matasano, 2 years after selling to NCC, and I spotted him talking about a new "hiring" kind of company on hackernews... Well today they announced what is going to be a new kind of hiring process. After the revolution of education with Coursera and other MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), now comes the revolution of hiring. It's called Starfighter and it will be live soon.

Cryptography Services will audit OpenSSL posted March 2015

It looks like Cryptography Services, the group I will be interning at, is going to conduct a public audit of OpenSSL.

More info here

By the way, if you missed it, they are currently auditing TrueCrypt.

This all sounds very exciting =)

EDIT: and here's the official statement

GPS tracking device in real life! posted March 2015

I've only seen that in movies. Not that it couldn't exist, it's just "fun" to see that happen in real life as well.

The story is here. It's about someone's car which got "bugged". It was discovered while X was at the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain.

more pictures there

Funny matasano job post posted March 2015

I stumbled on this funny job post from jeff jarmoc:

This thread will, no doubt, be dominated by posts with laundry lists of requirements. Many employers will introduce themselves by describing what they want from you. At Matasano, we're a little different. We like to start by telling you about us. This month, I want to try to do that by drawing analogy to Mission Impossible.
What made the original show so great is exactly what was lost in the 'Tom Cruise takes on the world' reboot. The original 1960's and 70's Mission Impossible was defined primarily by a team working together against all odds to achieve their objective. It acknowledged that what they were doing was improbable, and more so for a solo James Bond or Tom Cruise character. As a team though, each character an expert in their particular focus area, the incredible became credible -- the impossible, possible.

the rest is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127813