Let’s assume for a minute that the FBI got its way. It coerces Apple into disabling the self-destruct function on the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone, allowing it to brute force the password. Effectively, the FBI and Apple create a backdoor that theoretically works the same across all iPhones. Police even uses the same tactic on the dozens of other iPhones that are currently involved in active investigations. People across the world sacrifice their privacy, while the police has a new tool to fight terrorists.

Except they don’t, really. Sure, iMessage and other iCloud services could be decrypted without a password, but what Apple critics often fail to realize is the abundance of third-party encryption tools widely available. Free, open-source alternatives exist to encrypt chats, phone calls, files, and even entire hard drives. That pesky self-destruct function the FBI is so eager to remove? Alternatives for that exist as well, and they are all easily accessible with nothing more than a Google search. By removing the default encryption built in iPhones, the FBI isn’t stopping terrorists. It’s merely inconveniencing them.

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Symantec today announced the global release of a new product which will help companies encrypt user data on their websites.

The new product is called Encryption Everywhere, and it will be offered through hosting providers. According to a press release following the announcement, there will be a couple of levels of encryption and general protection the new service will offer, but Symantec would love to see every "legitimate" website in the world have at least the basic level of encryption by 2018.

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Look at Dropbox, all grown up and moving away from home. The company has announced that it is now using, almost entirely, its own custom-built infrastructure to hold data.

Dropbox says this is an important milestone, as it moves away from Amazon Web Services it relied on before. Still, it will continue to partner with Amazon, when "it makes sense for our users", Dropbox says.

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Besides being the super poplar search engine, email provider, work and collaboration services provider, Google is also used, by a number of different services, as an identity provider.

It allows people to register and log into different online services using their Google account. Now, the company announced it’s expanding the feature to add a number of new services, some of which are direct competitors.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly gained a great deal of momentum and buzz amongst companies in a variety of fields over the past year. Up until now, the idea that all of our devices would be connected to one another and sharing data seemed like a far off idea that would take many years to come to fruition.

However due to new technologies quickly becoming more cost-effective and advances in the amount of environmental data that sensors are able to collect, the potential of IoT will likely come to be realized much sooner than many of us originally expected.

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We are on the cusp of a totally connected world. The Internet of Things is no longer an emerging trend, it has arrived. If you want evidence -- real evidence rather than the speculation of industry analysts -- then take a look at the $1.4 billion Cisco reputedly put on the table at the start of February to acquire IoT platform provider Jasper Technologies.

Jasper, founded in 2004, came about as a result of an epiphany that CEO and founder Jahangir Mohammed had when, after seeing a warning light on his car dashboard, he needed to spend several hours finding a mechanic to diagnose a problem that a connected car could have done in seconds. Just 16 years later, in-car connectivity of some sort is expected as standard in most new cars.

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The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a nonpartisan research and educational institute and policy think tank, today became the latest to come out and urge the US government not to limit the commercial use of encryption.

In its new report, entitled Unlocking Encryption: Information Security and the Rule of Law, co-author Alan McQuinn -- an ITIF research assistant -- argued that restricting encryption for use by law abiding citizens and businesses would reduce overall security and be ineffective at keeping encryption out of the hands of terrorists.

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As the UK considers leaving the EU, tech businesses have weighed in on whether or not they are in favor of such a move in a new survey conducted by techUK.

70 percent of its members are in favor of the UK remaining within the EU while 15 percent want the UK to leave. The remaining 15 per cent of techUK’s members were undecided on the issue.

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Now that HTC Vive has become available, we seem to have moved past virtual reality that gives you motion sickness and we can really start to grasp its impact on various business sectors. From reinventing tourism and the music industry to changing marketing and shopping behaviors, businesses are already starting to integrate VR solutions into their strategies and plans.

But with Mark Zuckerberg recently saying he thinks VR is still ten years away from being mainstream, it’s worth examining why.

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Among businesses, data migration seems to be a much bigger issue than previously thought. Those are the results of a new report by Vision Solutions, entitled 2016 State of Resilience.

It gathered responses from more than 2,000 CTOs, CIOs and other IT leaders all around the world, from North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and looked at various data trends including migration, HA/DR, cloud and data sharing.

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According to a report by one of the big four auditors, KPMG, more than 40 percent of companies that suffer a major business disruption are unable to recover from the long-term impact of the failure, and go out of business within two years.

To avoid this fate, organizations must have a solid disaster recovery strategy in place.

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"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". So goes the quote from Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, in 1755. Little did he know that over 250 years later, his words would be frequently cited in one of the most complex debates of modern times.

In a world where data is collected, shared and sold as the norm, the liberty vs. security question has never been so relevant. The topic has been brought into the public eye by the UK Home Secretary’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill -- or Snoopers’ Charter -- and honed-in on the issue of encryption. More specifically, whether government agencies should be given the power to access encrypted, private communications, by forcing service providers to hand them over.

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The slogan "there is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer", accompanied by an image of a worried looking cloud, has been doing the rounds for some time now. It’s overly simplistic but it neatly sums up the mistrust that some computer users have about cloud technology.

The inference being that people who trust the cloud and believe the hype are in some way naïve. The extension of which is that, if you’re giving your data to someone else, how can you be sure it’s safe? This is why cloud security needs to be part of the software development lifecycle.

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The fourth quarter of 2015 saw an increase in servers shipped worldwide, compared to a year before, with revenue also rising. Those are the results seen in Gartner’s latest report on worldwide shipments of servers.

According to Gartner, Q4 2015 saw a jump in shipments of 8.2 percent year-on-year, with revenue up 9.2 percent. Looking at the year as a whole, shipments are up 9.9 percent, and revenue is up 10.1 percent.

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A new service has launched in the UK, which will allow the country’s citizens to easily verify their identity online. Called CitizenSafe, it is the brainchild of global specialists in identity data intelligence, GBG.

CitizenSafe was created after a survey had shown that people expect to access government services easily and securely online, and that online identity verification was a key step. It will be integrated within the UK government's gov.uk Verify service, and GBG says it will cut the time needed to verify an identity to mere minutes.

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