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Email encryption now made easy with the new StartMail service

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Zeist, The Netherlands, November 13, 2014, PRNewswire:StartMail.com, the private email service offering revolutionary one-click PGP encryption, officially launches today at the Privacy Identity Innovation conference (pii2014) and already has over 20,000 requests for its subscription-based service.

CEO Robert Beens attributes StartMail’s early success to Ed Snowden’s revelations about government surveillance, along with concerns that Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail are scanning people’s private communications for marketing purposes. “Consumers are ready for a change. They’re fed up with dragnet government surveillance and the ‘stalker economy’,” he said.

encrypted mail

Snowden has advised people to protect themselves with encryption, but until now few have been able to follow his advice, given how difficult it can be to set up and use encryption. StartMail has solved this problem by empowering users to encrypt email messages with just one click. It’s so easy even a beginner can use it.

“It’s time people start using encryption for their everyday communications,” Beens said. “So we’ve made it easy. StartMail is Web-based, supports IMAP, and has great privacy tools like disposable email addresses and Q&A encryption.” These state-of-the-art privacy features have attracted a passionate user community, with more than 70,000 people signing up as beta testers or requesting account invitations.

StartMail is based outside of U.S. jurisdiction in Europe, where it is not directly subject to U.S. mass surveillance mandates, and the company has vowed never to cooperate with programs like PRISM. StartMail was built by the team behind StartPage.com and Ixquick.com, the world’s most private search engines, which have a proven track record of protecting user privacy for nearly 10 years.

Unlike other companies, StartMail does not mine customer data for marketing revenue, and never reads people’s messages. One-year StartMail subscriptions are $59.95 (€49,95), or about $5 per month and can be purchased online at http://www.startmail.com .

“Society pays a high price for those so-called ‘free’ services, so we’ve taken a different path,” said Beens. “We answer to our customers, not marketers or government agents. By supporting us, our users are staking a claim in the privacy revolution. We believe everyone has a right to communicate securely. That’s why privacy is not just our policy. It’s our mission,” said Beens.

About StartPage, Ixquick, and StartMail

StartMail.com is a private email service based in the Netherlands that makes PGP encryption accessible and easy to use. StartPage and Ixquick are private search engines offering complete anonymity, a free proxy service, and consistently high ratings on security measures. For more information, please see StartMail.com, StartPage.com, or Ixquick.com.

About pii2014

The 5th annual Privacy Identity Innovation conference, pii2014 Silicon Valley, is being held November 12-14 at the Crowne Plaza Palo Alto hotel. The conference explores where innovation is heading, what it means for the future of privacy and identity, and how to build trust in emerging technologies and business models.

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Google team exposes vulnerability in SSL 3.0 encryption, so, well, the 15 year old system may soon be history

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Every passing day throws up newer issues around Online security. Google researchers have now revealed that the much-used Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 has a vulnerability. The team carried out an experiment called Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy or (POODLE) to explore this. Essentially it established that this system weakness could be exploited by hackers to get into & make away with ostensibly encrypted Online data.

The Google security team comprising Bodo Möller, Thai Duong & Krzysztof Kotowicz have now recommended the disabling of SSL 3.0 on both – server & client side. That’s the only way to escape this. The other of course is to upgrade to the more sophisticated Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 & 1.1 versions. In short, the SSL protocol may not be 100 % hacker-proof.

Both, the  (TLS) & its predecessor, SSL, are cryptographic protocols designed to provide communication security over the Internet. Which means once deployed, they enable safer communications within your brower & the Web server at the other end.

Here’s what the Googlers have posted on the official blog: SSL 3.0 is nearly 15 years old, but support for it remains widespread. Most importantly, nearly all browsers support it and, in order to work around bugs in HTTPS servers, browsers will retry failed connections with older protocol versions, including SSL 3.0. Because a network attacker can cause connection failures, they can trigger the use of SSL 3.0 and then exploit this issue.

Google Chrome and our servers have supported TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV since February and thus we have good evidence that it can be used without compatibility problems. Additionally, Google Chrome will begin testing changes today that disable the fallback to SSL 3.0. This change will break some sites and those sites will need to be updated quickly. In the coming months, we hope to remove support for SSL 3.0 completely from our client products.

 

 

Image Credit: Google

 

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