Stories about: NSA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit against the US National Security Agency (NSA), US President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other government officials, alleging that an NSA electronic surveillance program continues to illegally spy on US residents.

VeriSign is in many ways synonymous with managing the Web, thanks to its handling of key DNS root servers and of name resolution for .com, .net, and other domains. In recent years, it's had both strong ups and strong downs.

Researchers have developed two new techniques for stealing data from a computer that use some unlikely hacking tools: cameras and telescopes.

A server problem at the US National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.

Researchers are touting an innovative cryptography method they've developed called "functional encryption," which though largely untested in the real world, one day could have an impact on how enterprise data is encrypted, stored and decrypted.

US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his agency is working on a "reverse Manhattan Project" to help secure the federal government's computer systems.

It was 1996, the bandwidth between Australia and the rest of the world was miserable, and Andrew Tridgell had a problem. He wanted to synchronize source code located in Australia with source code on machines around the world, but sending patches was annoying and error-prone, and just sending all the files was painfully slow. Most people would have just waited a few years for trans-Pacific bandwidth to improve; instead Tridgell wrote rsync, the first known instance of content-based addressing (also known as content-addressed storage, or compare-by-hash), an innovation which eventually spread to software like BitTorrent, git, and many document storage products on the market.

Monta Vista, the mobile and embedded Linux company, unveiled version 5.0 of its carrier-grade embedded Linux kernel this week.

More than half of all US government executives have rolled out open-source software at their agencies, and 71 percent believe their agency can benefit from open-source software, according to a survey.

More than 100 college-age programmers might be seeing visions of dollar signs amid their code in the U.S. where the finals of this year's TopCoder Collegiate Challenge began in Orlando.

In areas such as CRM software and portals, open source gained a foothold because users were willing to compromise -- less could be more, because the price was right. In security, open source rushed in because commercial vendors fell down on the job. As security problems in the enterprise outstripped the capabilities of commercial solutions, a number of talented security researchers stepped into the breach via the open source model.