New submitter poseur writes: If you’re looking for an alternative to TrueCrypt, you could do worse than VeraCrypt, which adds iterations and corrects weaknesses in TrueCrypt’s API, drivers and parameter checking. According to the article, “In technical terms, when a system partition is encrypted, TrueCrypt uses PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1, 000 iterations. For standard containers and other (i.e. non system) partitions, TrueCrypt uses at most 2, 000 iterations. What Idrassi did was beef up the transformation process. VeraCrypt uses 327, 661 iterations of the PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 algorithm for system partitions, and for standard containers and other partitions it uses 655, 331 iterations of RIPEMD160 and 500, 000 iterations of SHA-2 and Whirlpool, he said. While this makes VeraCrypt slightly slower at opening encrypted partitions, it makes the software a minimum of 10 and a maximum of about 300 times harder to brute force.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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VeraCrypt Is the New TrueCrypt — and It’s Better
Passenger rail has never been known for punctuality (at least in this century), but over the past year, Amtrak’s long distance passenger trains have reportedly gone from being late 35 percent of the time to being late 60 percent of the time. But don’t blame Amtrak—it’s being forced to make way for the thousands of trains carrying oil from the Midwest. Read more… 
