miniLock app makes Encryption easy!
Use of encryption is on the rise. More than ever before encryption is being adopted by criminals, governments, and wise technology users. The U.S. court systems annual report on law enforcement eavesdropping in 2013 stated that encryption foiled state police attempts to serveil criminal suspects in 9 different cases. That number is more than twice the amount claimed by police in 2012 and before that the number was zero. Encryption is an extremely important aspect of safe and private technology use but it is not without its difficulties.
Encryption can be and often is complicated. For the average person it is not easy to jump right into encrypting all of your files, emails, and internet use. Whistleblower Edward Snowden had made a 12 minute long tutorial explaining how to use PGP – an encryption and decryption program developed by Symantec – so that he could communicate securely via email with journalist Glenn Greenwald. Even with that tutorial Greenwald still found it extremely difficult to use PGP.
Nadim Kobeissi creator of the well-known secure chat application Cryptocat aims to demolish the learning curve for cryptography. He plans to release a beta version of miniLock, an all-purpose file encryption program, at the HOPE hacker conference this year in New York. MiniLock is an open-source and free browser plug-in designed to let basically anyone encrypt and decrypt files with practically uncrackable protection in seconds.
Nadim the 23 year old coder, activist, and security consultant stated that “it’s super simple, approachable, and it’s almost impossible to be confused using it.” He also said that the tagline for miniLock is “this is file encryption that does more with less!” Kobeissi says his software is in experimental stages and shouldn’t be used to encrypt high security files yet. miniLock may in fact be the easiest encryption tool of its kind. Wired news had tested an early version of the plug in on Google Chrome and was able to drag and drop a file into the program in seconds. The application then scrambled the data so that no one except the person the file was intended for could decrypt it and in theory not even law enforcement officials could unscramble the data.
The easy to use software can encrypt anything from video email attachments to photos being stored on a USB flash drive or even encrypt files to be stored on Dropbox and Google Drive. The ability for regular people to encrypt files is a valuable thing. Nadim Kobeissi has taken away the complexity of encryption and made a thing that does what we need it to do. It’s as simple as that. Happy encrypting!
(Image Source: iCLIPART)