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(042522 BOSTON, MA): A demonstrator holds a sign during a rally calling for affordable MBTA fares for those with a low-income held outside the Park St T station on April 25, 2022 in BOSTON, MA. (Staff Photo By Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

Agency staffers are developing the details of a low-income fare program that would expand reduced fare options for certain groups, including students, young adults, seniors and people with disabilities.

The pending policy could reach between 50,000-60,000 riders over the first five years, said Steven Povich, the MBTAs senior director of fare policy and analytics.

Estimates show that there are roughly 60,000 adults ages 26 to 64 who have incomes under 200% of the federal poverty level but have no reduced MBTA fare benefits, Povich said. Slashing their fares in half could translate into $720 in annual savings for daily bus and subway riders, and $1,908 for certain commuter rail riders.

This is really significant savings for our riders across our network, whether youre a frequent or infrequent rider, whether youre on the bus and subway network, or the commuter rail, Povich said. The annual savings are really material.

Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for calls and messages across its Facebook and Messenger platforms, the company announced Thursday.

Such encryption means that no one other than the sender and the recipient not even Meta can decipher peoples messages. Encrypted chats, first introduced as an optional feature in Messenger in 2016, will now be the standard for all users going forward, according to Messenger head Loredana Crisan.

This has taken years to deliver because weve taken our time to get this right, Crisan wrote in a blog post. Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product managers have worked tirelessly to rebuild Messenger features from the ground up.

The new features will be available immediately, but Crisan wrote that it would take some time for the privacy feature to be rolled out to all of its users.

Read more from the original source:
Ticker: MBTA expanding fare discounts; Meta rolls out end-to-end encryption - Boston Herald

End-to-end encryption is the main feature of Protons software. The Swiss software developer started with Proton Mail a few years ago, and now operates a variety of useful apps that you can bundle together or use separately, depending on your needs. Proton Drive is one of them, offering a great cloud alternative to Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and others.

Every Proton account gets free Proton Drive storage, though youll want to go premium if you need significantly more space for your documents and photos.

Were most likely to back up photos and videos on our phones. Thats where the new Proton Drive feature comes in handy. Youll be able to automatically back up your photos to the cloud, starting with Android. The iPhone app will get a similar feature down the road.

You might be already backing up photos to the cloud with Google Photos or Apples iCloud. As the recent Google Drive data issues have proven, you can never be too careful when it comes to storing your stuff in the cloud. It might be a good idea to keep separate cloud and physical backups of key information in your life, including photos and videos.

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Thats where the new Proton Drive photo backup feature will help, with an added benefit. It comes with end-to-end encryption, which means nobody gets to see your photos or metadata associated with them. Think location information and file names associated with your images:

Photos are in many ways even more sensitive than other kinds of information. They hold emotional value, but they also quietly contain troves of vital data, from your biometrics to your precise location. You may also take pictures of sensitive documents, like your passport, Social Security card, driving license, or tax returns.

The Android app will let you quickly enable photo backup. All you need to do is give Proton Drive access to the photos stored on your Android device. After that, syncing will begin, and youll be able to access your photos on any device.

A similar feature is in beta for Proton Drive for iOS and should be available to iPhone and iPad users in the future.

Proton further explained in a blog post on Thursday that once you back your photos and videos to the cloud, youll be able to easily view and browse though your collection.

The files will be organized in chronological order for easy navigation. As expected, you can manage your photo library in the cloud, which means you can download and/or delete files. Marking files as available offline means youll get access to them even when theres no internet connection.

Aside from the iPhone app, Proton also plans to add other photo-related features to backups. The company is working on support for albums and automatic categorization based on photo types. Unspecified smarter features are also coming to a future version of Proton Drive, which will use on-device machine learning. This likely refers to editing photos in the cloud.

You can test Proton Drive by getting started at this link. You get up to 1GB of free storage, with premium plans starting at $3.99 per month for 200GB of storage. Bundles that include other Proton services might be an even better idea.

Read more here:
Proton Drive brings end-to-end encrypted photo backups to Android - BGR

Today, Meta has unveiled what it calls "the biggest set of improvements to Messenger since it was first launched in 2011." First and foremost, end-to-end encryption is now a default for private chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook, meaning your secured communication can't be spied on by others not even by Meta itself, apparently. Once updated, Messenger will ask users to set up a PIN, in case they need to recover messages on a new device later. The global rollout may take a few months to complete, due to the fact that the app has over a billion users.

End-to-end encryption became an option for Messenger in 2016, but Meta is obviously stepping up its safety efforts a sensible move given the company's other recent scandals, especially with child predation content. Meta added that "this has taken years to deliver because weve taken our time to get this right," and also "to rebuild Messenger features from the ground up."

Meta

In addition to a set of new privacy, safety and control features, Messenger is getting improved image quality for photos and videos. Meta says it's currently testing HD media sharing with a small test group, before rolling this out "in the coming months." Messenger is also receiving other handy tools that are seemingly inspired by WhatsApp, namely message edit (for up to 15 minutes after sending), voice message playback speed options, continued voice message playback outside the chat or app, read receipts control and disappearing messages (after 24 hours; this is now available to all chats since end-to-end encryption has become a default).

More:
Facebook Messenger update sets default end-to-end encryption for chats and calls - Engadget

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Meta will start automatically encrypting Facebook and Messenger chats, it has said.

The new end-to-end encryption ensures that messages are scrambled as they are delivered, so that they cannot be read by anyone else, including the company itself.

Security experts and companies including Meta and Apple have argued that the technology is key to ensuring that communications on the internet remain safe. But it has attracted criticism from governments and law enforcement.

The new features will be available immediately but the company said it would take some time for end-to-end encryption to be rolled out to the more than one billion users on the platform.

Users will receive a prompt to set up a recovery method to restore their messages once the transition is completed.

However critics, including UK police and the Government, have claimed the rollout will make it harder to detect child sexual abuse on the platform, andHome Secretary James Cleverly said he was incredibly disappointed Meta has not listened.

Loredana Crisan, head of Messenger, wrote in a post announcing the change: The extra layer of security provided by end-to-end encryption means that the content of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the receivers device.

This means that nobody, including Meta, can see whats sent or said, unless you choose to report a message to us.

She added: This is the biggest set of improvements to Messenger since it was first launched in 2011.

Im proud of what Messenger has become: a fast and reliable service, with enjoyable features and strong safety tools, and now with the added privacy and security of end-to-end encryption.

Apps including iMessage, Signal and WhatsApp all already protect the privacy of messages with E2EE.

Mr Cleverly said: This Government supports strong encryption, but this cannot come at the cost of public security, especially the safety of our children.

Law enforcement, charities and our close international partners all agree: these plans to roll out end-to-end encryption without appropriate safety measures will empower child sex abusers and hamper the ability of the police and National Crime Agency to bring offenders to justice.

I am incredibly disappointed Meta has not listened especially when we have worked together to make great progress in tackling other online harms, including signing our Online Fraud Charter.

We have been clear that there is no contradiction between child safety and privacy, this need not be an either/or. We know that end-to-end encryption can be implemented responsibly in a way that is consistent with public safety.

Well continue to work closely with Meta to keep children safe online, but we must be honest that in our view, this is a significant step back.

Simon Bailey, a former police chief constable who was national lead for child protection at the National Police Chiefs Council, accused Meta of a complete loss of social and moral responsibility over the plans.

John Carr, who is secretary of a coalition of UK childrens charities to deal with internet safety, called the move utterly unconscionable.

Their comments came after head of the National Crime Agency Graeme Biggar said introducing end-to-end encryption on Facebook would be like consciously turning a blind eye to child abuse.

Then home secretary Suella Braverman alleged that Facebook Messenger and Instagram direct messages were the platforms of choice for online paedophiles, telling the BBC that we are arresting in this country about 800 perpetrators a month, we are safeguarding about 1,200 children a month from this evil crime.

Meta said it had worked with outside experts, academics, advocates and governments to identify risks to ensure that privacy and safety go hand-in-hand.

It said: When E2EE is default, we will also use a variety of tools, including artificial intelligence, subject to applicable law, to proactively detect accounts engaged in malicious patterns of behaviour instead of scanning private messages.

The firm also announced that it would add a number of new features, including the ability to edit messages for up to 15 minutes after they have been sent.

It will also give users the ability to control if people who send messages receive read receipts telling them a message has been read.

NSPCC chief executive Sir Peter Wanless said: By starting to roll out end-to-end encryption on their services, Meta are choosing to turn a blind eye to crimes against children we know to be proliferating on their platforms. Where is their duty of care to children in taking this step?

Without telling us how they will spot such activity in future, we can only conclude they are happy to allow groomers to exploit young people at will on their services, instead of enabling abusers to be spotted and punished. This flies in the face of the priority the public attaches to basic child safety online.

Susie Hargreaves, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, said: We are outraged Meta has chosen to prioritise the privacy of paedophiles over the safety of our children. We strongly urge other platforms not to follow this dreadful example.

This catastrophic decision to encrypt messaging services, without demonstrating how protection for children wont be weakened, will lead to at least 21 million reports of child sexual abuse going undetected. Meta is effectively rolling out the welcome mat for paedophiles.

It is now up to Ofcom to show its teeth and demonstrate it is serious about protecting the privacy and safety of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

Additional reporting by agencies

See the original post here:
Meta starts adding controversial encryption to Facebook and Messenger chats - The Independent

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company.

Even at the time, this was a feature for the paranoid users. By turning on the feature, all emails sent from Facebook mostly notifications of likes and private messages to the users who opted-in would be encrypted with the decades-old technology called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP.

Eight years later, Facebook is killing the feature due to low usage, according to the company. The feature was deprecated Tuesday.

Facebook declined to specify exactly how many users were still using the encrypted email feature. It is not hard to believe that practically nobody was using it. And as much as I love encryption, killing this feature makes a lot of sense.

First of all, you can switch off email notifications entirely for the simple reason that you can see those notifications in Facebooks app or in the browsers. Why would you want to get notified twice that your friend tagged you without asking for permission in that party photo where you are drunk?

For example, I used the email encryption feature at the time, but I also later switched off email notifications, so that feature was useless to me.

Also, who the hell uses PGP in the year of our lord 2023? Even the inventor of PGP, the revered cryptographer Phil Zimmermann, said he wasnt using PGP back in 2015.

The irony is not lost on me, Zimmerman told me in an email at the time.

Zimmermann said that the main reason he wasnt using PGP is that he couldnt run the necessary encryption software on his MacBook, since Symantec bought PGP in 2010 to incorporate the technology into its own products. Zimmerman also said there was no version of PGP ever ran on an iOS device. (It is worth noting that you can encrypt emails and files on Macs using GPG Tools, which served as PGPs de facto replacement after the Symantec acquisition if you like to inflict that kind of pain on yourself.)

I still use PGP very occasionally. If you want to annoy me, you can use my public PGP key to send me an encrypted message, which would be so much easier to read and respond to if you sent it to me on Signal or WhatsApp instead.

Rest in peace, Facebook email encryption. You wont really be missed.

Originally posted here:
Used by only a few nerds, Facebook kills PGP-encrypted emails - TechCrunch