During Jacob Applebaum's talk at DebConf15, he noted that Debian should TLS-enable all services, especially the mirrors.

His reasoning was that when a high-value target downloads a security update for package foo, an adversary knows that they are still using a vulnerable version of foo and try to attack before the security update has been installed.

In this specific case, TLS is not of much use though. If the target downloads 4.7 MiB right after a security update with 4.7 MiB has been released, or downloads from security.debian.org, it's still obvious what's happening. Even padding won't help much as the 5 MiB download will also be suspicious. The mere act of downloading anything from the mirrors after an update has been released is reason enough to try an attack.

The solution, is, of course, Tor.

The NSA has nothing on the ed tech startup known as Knewton.

The data analytics firm has peered into the brains of more than 4 million students across the country. By monitoring every mouse click, every keystroke and every split-second hesitation as children work through digital textbooks, Knewton is able to find out not just what individual kids know but how they think. It can tell who has trouble focusing on science before lunch — and who will struggle with fractions next Thursday.

There's no public key encryption for Android yet, but that's an important feature for many of us. APG tries to fill that void, with new features quickly being added. Hopefully APG will grow into a fully functional OpenGPG implementation of GPG or PGP calibre.