Secure Communication Comes To Android

An anonymous reader writes "Forbes is reporting that Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson's startup, Whisper Systems, has released a public beta of two Android applications that provide encrypted call and SMS capabilities for your Android phone. In the wake of recent GSM attacks, it'll be interesting to see if smartphones end up providing a platform that fundamentally changes the security we can expect from mobile communication."

Comments

Ever dropping cost of energy?

[cdrguru]

Well, I hate to break it to you, but more than a few people are of the opinion that people in the US and companies should start paying for their impact on the climate, i.e., a carbon tax. Oh, and with that little hiccup in the Gulf they want companies to pay for their potential environmental impact as well. This would be a pre-emptive strike against coal and oil.

Today, that would mean $10 a gallon gasoline and similarly doubling or tripling the cost of coal.

I suspect it will be a difficult measure to pass, but it is very likely to do so in the near future. Certainly Obama is on the side of a carbon tax.

Considering we haven't built a big power plant in decades and are on the edges of running out of electric power, I don't see this getting any cheaper anytime soon either. There are proposals to build new nuclear plants, but they will likely sit for years and years as the environmental battles go on and on. Even if we pushed the environmentalists out of the way it would be 10 years before a large plant came online.

I keep hearing about building new transmission lines to improve the grid? Where? Maybe in the middle of Montana or in Death Valley. I know anyone proposing building such a thing near a populated area is just being stupid - every such proposal lately has been shot down. This is why they are thinking of building a new transmission line through a lake because there are no homes at the bottom of the lake.

We are likely to see rationing of electricity within the next few years. Transportation is going to get a lot more expensive and this will push the price of everything up. It might make cheap stuff from China impractical to ship to the US which would be a net benefit, but it will also make farm goods from the state next door much more expensive.

Here comes the terror

[joelsanda]

It won't be long until people try to light shoes on fire on cross-Atlantic flights or attempt something on a plane landing in, oh, say, Detroit or something. All because people have something to hide ...