Traditionally, a major source of high-quality pirate releases has been retail discs, such as Blu-ray or DVD. Today, torrent and streaming sites are regularly fueled by content culled from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. Known online as WEB releases, these files are the product of a decryption process using tools mostly not intended for public use. Recently, TF spoke with a person involved in the secretive WEB scene.

Tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.

So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.

What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice.

Over the past 25 years, email has weaved itself into the daily fabric of life. Our inboxes contain everything from very personal letters, to work correspondence, to unsolicited inbound sales pitches. In many ways, they are an extension of our homes: private places where we are free to deal with what life throws at us in whatever way we see fit. Have an inbox zero policy? That’s up to you. Let your inbox build into the thousands and only deal with what you can stay on top of? That’s your business too.

It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature “Read Receipts” and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients. You’ve heard the term “Read Receipts” before, so you have most likely been conditioned to believe it’s a simple “Read/Unread” status that people can opt out of. With Superhuman, it is not.

I noticed most people focusing on making more complex ledgers capable of executing "smart" contracts and/or crypto-magically obscuring transaction details and such. And I think those projects are pretty cool, but I'd always wanted to attempt to do the opposite and implement the simplest decentralized ledger I possibly could given lessons learned from bitcoin. I think that's what cruzbit is. Anything that I thought wasn't strictly necessary in bitcoin, or was otherwise weird, I got rid of. I wanted the design to be conceptually simple and extremely developer-friendly. I finally had some personal time on my hands so I decided, why not.

And now cruzbit exists.

This first post in our Protect your Privacy series, guides to help you protect your privacy and personal data, we have compiled some of the best privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don’t track you.

If you think we’ve missed something out, please leave a comment with your submission and we’ll do our best to add it.

It’s 9 a.m. on a typical morning in Chengdu and I’m awakened by the sound of my phone alarm. The phone is in my study, connected to my bedroom by sliding doors. I turn off the alarm, pick up my phone, and, like millions of people in China, the first thing I do is check my WeChat. At 9:07, I send my first message of the day.

Before 10 on a normal day in Chengdu, WeChat knows the following things about me: It knows roughly when I wake up, it knows who has messaged me and who I message, it knows what we talk about. It knows my bank details, it knows my address and it knows my coffee preference in the morning. It knows my biometric information; it knows the very contours of my face.

In exchange for free mails, would you let your postman open your letters, read them, and insert ads related to their contents?

Meshbird create distributed private networking between servers, containers, virtual machines and any computers in different datacenters, different countries, different cloud providers. All traffic transmit directly to recepient peer without passing any gateways. Meshbird do not require any centralized servers. Meshbird is absolutly decentralized distributed private networking.

For example, user can create private network between DigitalOcean’s droplets in each datacenter and link it together by executing one command. All traffic will be encrypted with strong AES-256.

The second article in our series on privacycoins looks at Monero. One of the oldest privacycoins on the market, it's based on the innovative CryptoNote protocol first used by Bytecoin.

Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet.

Encryptr is free and Open-Source password manager that is based on a very secure ‘Zero-Knowledge Crypton Framework‘. Zero-Knowledge system does not allow even a server to know what data is being sent and saved on the server by user. Encryptr saves all of your passwords, credit card data, PINs, or access codes, in the cloud with a simple and sleek user interface.

A method for measuring substantially spherical particles, such as dust. Two signals are formed, one of which is an approximately linear function of the particle concentration independently of the particle diameter and the second one is an approximately linear function of the particle diameter independently of the particle concentration. In order to obtain these signals the particles are illuminated with light in a direction different from their direction of flow. At least two detectors are arranged in such a way that the light in the beam path from the light source (3) to the first detector (6) is substantially only influenced by scattering and by light absorption of the particles and that the light in the beam path from the light source to the second detector (7) passes substantially only via reflections against the particles. The two signals are formed by definite relations between the d.c. voltage components of the output signals of the detectors and the average value of the squared R.M.S. value of the a.c. voltage component of the output signal from one of the detectors.

This extension prevents Google, Yahoo and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them. This is useful when copying links but it also helps privacy by preventing the search engines from recording your clicks.

Tails is a live operating system, that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, and helps you to:

• use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship;
• all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network;
• leave no trace on the computer you are using unless you ask it explicitly;
• use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, emails and instant messaging.

RetroShare is a Open Source cross-platform, Friend-2-Friend and secure decentralised communication platform.
It lets you to securely chat, share photos, videos, and more with family and friends, using OpenPGP to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication.

Latest batch of documents leaked shows NSA's power to pwn.

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