News Headlines - 27 February 2014

▽Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ | theguardian.com

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

▽Merkel addresses the British parliament | DW.DE

In her speech at Westminster on Thursday (27.2.2014), the German chancellor stressed that she was strongly in favor of Britain remaining part of the EU. This doesn't make Prime Minister Cameron's position any easier.

▽Blackphone, Boeing Self-Destructing Phone Are Security Motivated

NSA revelations of the last few months have prompted new thinking about mobile-device security. (If content from the phone of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel can be intercepted, what hope is there for yours?) Two of the more dramatic examples of this are the Blackphone, from Silent Circle and Geeksphone, which became available for preorder Feb. 21, and the Boeing Black smartphone.

▽Americans can't live without the web – but social media is a different story | theguardian.com

New data from the Pew Research Internet Project illustrates America’s embrace of – and increasing reliance on – the internet since the 1990s. More than half of Americans (53%) admit they would find the internet “very hard” to give up, compared with 38% who thought so in 2006. When you compare those numbers to the measly 28% who feel this way about landline telephones, it shows a significant shift in preference toward different types of communication technologies.

▽Japan investigates ailing Bitcoin exchange MtGox - Telegraph

Japanese authorities are conducting a high-level investigation into the stricken Bitcoin exchange MtGox after it dramatically ceased trading earlier this week.
The Tokyo-based company, once the world’s biggest exchange for bitcoin virtual currency, is under the spotlight following reports that an estimated 744,000 bitcoins (around ￡210m) may have been stolen over several few years due to a security loophole.