General Gaming Article

Exposed: NSA's War on Encryption
Amazon's Upcoming Smartphone Could Be Free
EVE Online's Kristoffer Toubourg Headed To Riot Games
Google Expedites Data Encryption

Posted: 07 Sep 2013 05:41 PM PDT

Agency capable of cracking most online encryption

Who owns the Internet? That is one question humanity hasn't been able to answer with any degree of certainty hitherto and things are unlikely to change anytime soon. Now, it may be difficult for us to say who truly controls the Internet, but we can definitely tell you who's currently behaving like they are the ones who own it.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, skeletons are tumbling out of the National Security Agency's closet almost on a daily basis. And if you think you have already seen the most shocking bits of the this whole surveillance scandal pass you by, brace yourselves for you're about to get shocked on a massive scale once again.

According to recent reports published by The Guardian and the New York Times, the National Security Agency and its British chum the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have "cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails."

The documents accessed by the two media outlets reveal that, at the turn of the century, the NSA began pouring in billions of dollars into a furtive program codenamed "Bullrun". Aimed at defeating online encryption, it stumbled on a major breakthrough 10 years later, in 2010, when the agency acquired the ability to decrypt "vast amounts of Internet data" that had been considered unexploitable up until that point. The fact that the agency has made great strides in its war against encryption is clear from an internal GCHQ memo which describes those briefed about the the NSA's eavesdropping repertoire for the very time as feeling "gobsmacked."

The most worrying bit, though, is that the agency owes a lot of its eavesdropping capabilities to its success in secretively influencing tech companies to alter their product designs, "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems" and weaken security standards. All these activities are part of the SIGINT (signals intelligence) Enabling Project, a program the NSA has spent around $800 million on since 2011.

Although none of the companies that the NSA has been able to successfully influence are named in the documents, it is now known that its British counterpart, GCHQ, is keenly working on "understanding" Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. In fact, in a quarterly update from last year, GCHQ seemed particularly excited about some new "access opportunities" where Google was concerned.

All the above-named companies, save for Facebook, have now issued statements on these new revelations. Microsoft says it is seriously concerned and will press the government for answers. Meanwhile, Google says it hasn't seen any evidence of its security systems being circumvented in any way and insists that "the security of our users' data is a top priority."

Image Credit: Decrypted Matrix

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Amazon's Upcoming Smartphone Could Be Free

Posted: 07 Sep 2013 05:28 PM PDT

Could Amazon's smartphone be given away for "free?"

Rumors are circulating via TechSpot that Amazon's elusive smartphone could eventually hit the scene as a freebie. Amazon is supposedly considering giving out their as-yet-unnamed smartphone away to consumers, according to reports from Wall Street Journal reporters Jessica E. Lessin and Amir Efrati.

Both reporters have asserted that Amazon has been in talks with wireless providers about offering the phone through their respective channels, but they're most interested in providing the device through their storefront to avoid forcing customers to sign anything in order to receive the phone.

No matter how things end up working, Amazon's cell service will be an explosive entry to the arena, especially if it can be offered for free with service or packaged with some beneficial deals from the online giant.

EVE Online's Kristoffer Toubourg Headed To Riot Games

Posted: 07 Sep 2013 04:06 PM PDT

Toubourg jumps from one hit game to another

After a long and fruitful career with CCP and EVE Online, Kristoffer Toubourg is moving to Riot Games. EVE Online's lead designer is indeed jumping ship! The five-year stint spent with CCP in Iceland is ending for Toubourg as he makes his way to Riot in Dublin to work on the insanely popular League of Legends.

PCGamer reports the departure via Polygon, with a word with Toubourg himself on the move: "I feel a bit lucky that I get to work on not just one of my favorite games, but two of them. I don't think I could have asked for anything more and it's pretty humbling to go from one love to another. A few years ago, my overwhelming interest was the EVE universe; now it's League of Legends and the competitive scene there."

League of Legends

Good luck to Kristoffer, and we're looking forward to seeing what he can bring to Riot Games in the coming years.

Google Expedites Data Encryption

Posted: 07 Sep 2013 03:37 PM PDT

Google rushing to encrypt data

The National Security Agency will, in most cases, be able to access your most private of online data if they want to. Google wants to make sure they aren't forced to comply with the many requests they receive for data, however, as they scramble to encrypt their data centers and protect the precious information -- probably including yours.

The Washington Post's Craig Timberg (via PC Mag) states that Google has sped up plans to encrypt the data flowing to and from the company's data centers around the country. This appears to have been one of Google's weak spots, which would incidentally give large government agencies easier routes to email, web searches, and more.

There's no concrete information on what Google's actually doing to lock down their information or how much it's costing them to do so, but it's interesting to note that this behemoth of a company is going to great lengths to protect all this data. What lengths are you going to in order to keep your information encrypted?

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