Originally published 11th Dec. Updated 8th Jan with deep links. We were recently interviewed on the Crypto Gossip podcast. You can listen to the whole 40 minutes, or click the links below to listen to individual topics: Attacks on privacy in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks at 23:52 The new Crypto Wars: backdoors for authorities are backdoors for everyone at 29:15 Redecentralisating the internet

Let’s Encrypt has recently announced it has entered public beta. This is great news for the privacy movement. Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority[1] that provides free – as in no cost – trusted certificates and tools for automating getting, installing and configuring a certificate so that it provides the best security to users. This means anyone running a website can sign up for a certificate and secure the traffic between their site and the people using it, which ensures data that people share with the site will be kept private.

We’ve scheduled our kick off meetup in Melbourne for 18th January. We’ll run a special introduction to the group for new members, reset our goals for the year, listen to a quick talk about a privacy-related topic, and get to work on contributing to a privacy-enhancing open source tool. RSVP In the mean time, please join us on Slack, which will be the base of our operations for next year.

This information was originally published as part of a more comprehensive article covering what data retention is and how to protect yourself on robindoherty.com. On October 13th, the new metadata retention law came into effect in Australia. Data about your phone and internet communications are to be retained for at least two years and be accessible without warrants by government agencies comprising 2500 people. What phone data is retained? Phone numbers of everyone you called or sent SMS to, or missed a call from, times and dates of calls and SMS, durations of calls, your rough location at time of call or SMS.

A few Cryptohackers are going to be at YOW! Conference this year, in Melbourne on Thursday and Friday, 3rd & 4th December. If you’ve never heard of it, YOW! is pretty much the best software conference in Australia - there’s talks on languages, big data, frameworks, architecture, delivery, cloud, devops and tons more. Come down and chat to us at the ThoughtWorks booth, and we’ll be talking to anyone who will listen to us about the implications of the new data retention laws for our digital privacy and some simple things you can do to protect yourself and your friends and family, and how we can continue to build the digital privacy movement.