Germany's Angela Merkel isn't the only one riled over recent revelations of American surveillance and data gathering. Turns out
The American government conducted a major intelligence offensive against China , with targets including the Chinese government and networking company Huawei.
Edward Snowden is the source of the revelations, as reported to German daily Spiegel. Among the American intelligence service's targets were former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the Chinese Trade Ministry, banks, as well as telecommunications companies. But the NSA made a special effort to target Huawei.
According to a top secret NSA presentation, NSA workers not only succeeded in accessing the email archive, but also the secret source code of individual Huwaei products."
There's more than one way to compute a secure hash, from MD5 to SHA-3 to SHA-1 and beyond. So who cares about yet another: Blake2?
There are a couple of reasons you might be interested in checking out Blake2: It was rated best hash function in the SHA-3 competition, is faster than MD5, and cryptographers find that it's similar to the well-regarded SHA-2 algorithm in ways that matter.
Says developer Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn:
Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, Christian Winnerlein, and I decided that what the world needed was not just a secure hash function that was faster than Keccak, but one that was faster than MD5! This is because MD5 (and SHA-1) continue to be very widely used, even in new applications, even though MD5 and SHA-1 are unsafe for many uses. We hypothesized that offering engineers a hash function that was both faster and more secure than their beloved MD5 or SHA-1 might be more effective than haranguing them to upgrade to an alternative that is more secure but slower.
Have a look for yourself at Wilcox-O'Hearn's page.