This is an import of a tweet I made with twitlonger a while back
So the British Government want to stop companies using advanced encryption techniques, so that they can prevent terrorists, etc from using the Internet as a safe zone to communicate. :/
This is rather silly of the British Government, and will pave way for a far less secure Internet.
As proven by the recent hack on TalkTalk, hackers exist - be it in groups (such as Anonymous) or a single person (such as the kid who hacked TalkTalk).
Although hackers generally hack to prove a point (such as a company's security is weak), hackers often reveal customer information, such as account username -> passwords. While previously this information was encrypted to such a standard, the encryption was one-way (you could encrypt it, but not the reverse) the Government now wants the ability to be able to decrypt this information.
This is outrageously bad, because if the Government can decrypt the information; so can other people.
It is my hope that in-light of this people will start to use security methods such as two-step-authentication, so that just know the decrypted username and password isn't enough to access an account.
However this is not the end of the Government's efforts to help themselves. The Governments now also requires every company to track all their users search histories for up to a year!
Some companies have already been doing this for a large period of time, such as Google. This is why I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine.
I should mention that all the Government needs to access this information, is a warrant or a hacker to have made the information publically available.