Yahoo announced Thursday it would encode its email service by the next year, joining Google and Microsoft in an effort to make an email system for preventing government officials and hackers from it reading their users’ messages.
It’s an important decision taken by Yahoo that may continue for the Edward Snowden leaks, and it shows the commitment of the major technology companies to securing users’ data.
With Yahoo’s announcement, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, email encoding will protect nearly one billion email users. In the world, there are 110 million Yahoo email users and over 425 million unique email users of Google’s Gmail services. Microsoft shows that there are over 400 million active. Yahoo is announcing gives tremendous publicity to government surveillance techniques, the one who were employed by the National Security Agency.
“For internet users, this is a huge deal,” said Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Before, it was an easy job for NSA to gather up tons and tons of email.” But, Yahoo’s planned encoded services, “the NSA is not able to read and understand everyone’s email without any partiality.”
The encoding by Yahoo will base on what’s known as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption, which relies on every user information having both public and private encoding key. There will be a public encryption key, to which only any other email user will have access; encoding plan emails text into a complicated system. After that user’s code is decoded the code back into simple or plain text when it comes in their inbox. All of the keys acts like an x and y variable in the equation: if in any case you know the public key x, you won’t be able to break equation, because in this case you also need the private key y.
Yahoo going to make it hard for hackers

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