The Week-end Stock Pot Watch, Thursday, November 28th-December 1st. Holiday Edition!

[Demeter]

80. Microsoft, Yahoo Upgrades Shows Snowden Won, Obama Failed

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-29/microsoft-yahoo-upgrades-shows-snowden-won-obama-failed.html

Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden succeeded where President Barack Obama couldn’t -- getting Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. to upgrade computer security against hackers. Microsoft is the latest company considering measures to ensure the protection of customer data and strengthen security “against snooping by governments,” according to Brad Smith, general counsel for the Redmond, Washington-based company.

The companies are adopting harder-to-crack code to protect their networks and data, after years of largely rebuffing calls from the White House and privacy advocates to improve security. The new measures come after documents from Snowden revealed how U.S. spy programs gain access to the companies’ customer data -- sometimes with their knowledge, sometimes without -- and that’s threatening profits at home and abroad.

“These companies actively fought against numerous mechanisms that would have mandated far more secure data,” Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation in Washington, said in a phone interview. “Now they are paying the literal price.”

While Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook Inc. provide data to the government under court orders, they are trying to prevent the NSA from gaining unauthorized access to information flowing between computer servers by using encryption. That scrambles data using a mathematical formula that can be decoded only with a special digital key...

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