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'It is comforting to know where your data centres are.' UK.GOV does not

Plus: Anons are 'wannabes', KKK says, before being pwned

What's up WhatsApp

In a move that’s sure to annoy the hell out of spooks and cops worldwide, WhatsApp announced this week that it will encrypt all of its 600m users’ messages by default in the “largest deployment of end-to-end decryption ever”.

So far, the service only covers text rather than group messages or pictures and it only works on Android and it still remains open to potential man-in-the-middle attacks because there’s no way to verify the identity of the person you’re messaging, but still. Whisper Systems, the firm behind the software being used, said:

We have a ways to go until all mobile platforms are fully supported, but we are moving quickly towards a world where all WhatsApp users will get end-to-end encryption by default.

At EMC, top chief Joe Tucci has admitted that, as activist shareholders have been squealing about, there has been a little bit too much competition inside the federation. He said that it might have been better to have had some more coordination between EMC II, Pivotal and VMware offerings:

There is always friction. I think some friction is good. And to be honest, there is more friction than we should have today.

So, an example for new market activity is the internet of things and what’s happening in the telco market with the Network Functions Virtualisation, and there is the opportunity, a huge opportunity.

So, there [are] places where you want to align really tightly, where customers want it, where there are real big market opportunities around where and how product sets fit. It’s time to make major corrections there.

He also said that the time may be approaching when EMC looks to spin off VMware, but only if the shareholders push it:

Is this the exact right time to do it [spin-off Vmware] or should we give it a shot? And that’s going to be your decision ultimately, you shareholders’ decision ... we are building a strategy, which is working. We have placed the right bets. We got to make those bets pay off. And then we have got to give you a better roadmap ... we have earnings on the 27th [January 2015], so it will be sometime after that. And we will lay it out for you. And we will tell you 'here is what we are thinking'. And then shareholders can make up their decision.

In Blighty, the cabinet minister Francis Maude has said that doing business in the cloud is better than doing it, say, in the government’s own data centres. He said:

Doing things in the cloud is more secure than doing [it] ourselves. It is comforting to know where your data centres are - although in government we don’t always. But actually cloud providers live or die by their cloud security.

Who’s hacking Hacker?

He also pointed out what everyone’s known for some time - government IT contracts are too big and too long:

In IT, no contract should be more than £100m, with no extensions, so we can keep up to date. And we should not have hosting contracts of more than two years, as the cost [of hosting] is halving every 18 months. [So] that starts to help in that area because we are constantly renewing and updating.

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