"TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas 'worth spreading'," says Evgeny Morozov, once himself a speaker on the TED platform. In this article for The New Republic, he critically examines some of TED's newly-published books, criticising – in no uncertain terms --  the entire TED approach as he does so.

But encryption is not the only way of encoding messages. In this article from the BBC, Prof. Alan Woodward writes about the practice of embedding secret messages in apparently innocuous digital objects -- photos or travel blogs, for example.

Encryption services like CryptoCat and Hushmail are not as secure as you think, says expert Patrick Ball. In this article, he tells us why, and offers us a list of key questions we should ask when assessing any security tool.

#1: "White terrorists are called 'gunmen'....Other terrorists are called 'terrorists'." For numbers 2 to 10, go here.

Prominent journalists and opinion leaders in Venezuela had their Twitter accounts hacked, "in many cases by a mysterious pro-government group called N33," reports the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The German government is planning to develop its own spyware. But doesn't that go against its own constitution? asks Slate magazine.

Google has now officially opened an office in Berlin. "But the company has long been active in the German capital in its bid to influence government Internet policy," says German newspaper Der Spiegel.

Looking back at Cryptocat encryption software; from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), What We Learned.

What can happen when technology is used outside the context it was developed in? A lot of dodgy government spying, reports the New York Times