Top 10 Stories

The Next Web:  In a wide-ranging session at SXSW today, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen discussed everything from Syrian dissidents to robots taking our jobs.   Following reports that Britain’s GCHQ had intercepted data being transmitted between Google datacenters, Schmidt said that the company’s resulting security upgrade had left him “Pretty sure that information within Google is now safe from any government’s prying eyes.”    

Washington Post: Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said he repeatedly tried to go through official channels to raise concerns about government snooping programs but that his warnings fell on the deaf ears.   In testimony to the European Parliament released Friday morning, Snowden wrote that he reported policy or legal issues related to spying programs to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor he had no legal avenue to pursue further whistleblowing.    

The Verge: Speaking via Skype before an audience of thousands at South by Southwest, Julian Assange made the case for a new golden age of national security reporting, conducted largely by Americans in exile. "National security reporters are a new kind of refugee," Assange said, then ran down a list of American reporters and activists who have left US borders in order to continue their work, including Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Wikileaks' Sarah Harrison, and Tor...

NDTV Gadgets: Cybercriminals are settling into a comfortable place in the "Dark Web" where they test, refine and distribute malware for online thievery. That's the conclusion of researchers at McAfee, the US Internet security specialist, who noted that a huge data breach that affected as many as 110 million customers of the US retailer Target may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The Hacker News: U.S. Prosecutors decided not to pursue crucial criminal charges against journalist and activist Barrett Brown, and dismiss a majority of charges related to sharing a link to a dump of credit card numbers connected to the breach of intelligence firm Stratfor.   Supporters say Brown just copied the hyperlink from an the Internet chat room and then reposted the link on his own internet chat room, Project PM, that linked to stolen documents from...

Extreme Tech: Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening – yes, with amicrophone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data. The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware.   The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you’re a secret agent, power user, or some other kind of encryption-using miscreant, you may want to reach for the...

The Hacker News: Explosive revelations of massive surveillance programs conducted by government agencies by the former contractor Edward Snowden triggered new debate about the security and privacy of each individual who is connected somehow to the Internet and after the Snowden’s disclosures they think that by adopting encrypted communications, i.e. SSL enabled websites, over the Internet, they’ll be secure. People do care of their privacy and many have already changed some of their online habits, like...

Tech2: Privacy advocates have asked US regulators to halt Facebook Inc’s $19 billion acquisition of messaging service WhatsApp until there is a clearer understanding of how the company intends to use the personal data of WhatsApp’s 450 million users. WhatsApp, a service that allows mobile phone users to send each other messages, has had a longstanding commitment to not collect user data for advertising purposes. But there’s no guarantee that that commitment will hold true once the...

AP:  Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto said on Thursday that he is not the creator of Bitcoin, adding further mystery to the story of how the world's most popular digital currency came to be.   The denial came after Newsweek published a 4,500-word cover story claiming Nakamoto is the person who wrote the computer code underpinnings of Bitcoin. In an exclusive two-hour interview with the Associated Press, Nakamoto, 64, denied he had anything to do with...

BBC: Sensitive information should not be sent over public wi-fi hotspots, to avoid hackers stealing it, Europe's top cybercrime police officer has warned. Troels Oerting, head of Europol's cybercrime centre, told BBC Click people should send personal data only across networks they trusted. He said the warning was motivated by the growing number of attacks being carried out via public wi-fi.