Twitter says it has launched new, more secure messages – but even chief executive Elon Musk has warned users not to “trust it”. The social network has long been working on encrypted messages, which ensure that messages cannot be intercepted while they are being delivered. That is already possible on most other major messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp and iMessage. Now Twitter has released what it says is the first step towards integrating that security technology into its own product. But it says that it is not fully safe, and that users should not rely on it to keep messages secure. “Early version of encrypted direct messages just launched,” Mr Musk wrote on Twitter. “Try it, but don’t trust it yet.” On its support pages, Twitter’s aim is that “if someone puts a gun to our heads, we still can’t access your messages”. But it says it is “not quite there yet” and still “working on it”. That suggests that the messages are not end-to-end encrypted. While messages are secured from some attackers, anyone at Twitter or with access to its servers may still be able to access them. What’s more, Twitter’s implementation comes with a host of other limitations. It is only available when both of the users are verified and pay for Twitter’s $8 a month service, and users must turn it on rather than it being enabled by default. The messages also cannot be sent to groups, include pictures or other attachments, cannot be joined by new devices, are only supported on a limited number of devices per account and do not have proper protection against certain cyber attacks. When those various conditions are satisfied, users will be informed they are having an encrypted conversation by a message that appears within the chat. The other user’s profile picture will also show a lock icon over it. Twitter said that it would be updating the feature to remove some of those limitations, and would provide more information about the technology underpinning it in releases later this year.

Since Meta Platforms Inc. launched Threads on Wednesday, millions of users have joined the new social platform that

NEWARK, Del.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 8, 2023--

Along with a raft of other bands’ covers, a Simlish version of Wet Leg’s ‘Angelica’ features in the Horse Ranch add-on for ‘The Sims 4’.

Bitcoin fell below $27,000 for the first time in more than two weeks, erasing an earlier gain posted

In the week that it was announced that Rishi Sunak will be granting new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, new commitments to renewable energy are being made elsewhere in the world. The China Three Gorges Corporation just turned on a mega wind turbine with blades twice the size of a football pitch in the Taiwan Strait. The state-owned energy firm has activated the biggest wind turbine on the planet offshore in a move which could produce up to 16 megawatts of energy, and it’s now been connected and hooked up to the energy grid. The MySE 16-260 turbine stands at an incredible 500ft (152m) tall and it could power thousands of homes every year. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter In fact, it’s thought that around 36,000 homes will be served by electricity from the turbine. It’s not surprising given that each blade weighs around 54 tons and covers nearly 540,000 square feet when they rotate. Mingyang Smart Energy is the company that designed the turbine, and they released a message on LinkedIn making clear just how much wind the structure could deal with – stating that it can withstand “extreme wind speeds of 79.8 [meters per second]”. It’s a staggering feat of engineering and it’s thought that the turbine could save around 54,000 tons of carbon dioxide compared to coal power plants. More structures like one are being planned, too. Executive Director Lei Lei Zengjuan told the media: “In the next step, the 16 [megawatt] unit will be applied in batches in the second phase of the Zhangpu Liuao Offshore Wind Farm Project constructed by China Three Gorges Corporation.” It comes a few weeks after work was stopped on one of the UK’s largest offshore wind farms after its developer said that the cost of the project had soared by so much that it no longer made financial sense to push forward. Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, one of Europe’s biggest wind producers, shut down work on the development of the Norfolk Boreas site. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The last year has seen a record-breaking increase of online hate and harassment for many

Nintendo just added support for passkeys. When you set one up on your account you’ll

Google Bard is getting a little more internet-savvy and a little less inaccurately confident. Today,

Every morning, thousands of construction workers in Qatar start their day by soaking their uniforms in water. The

Robots fitted with AI developed by Google’s DeepMind have figured out how to play football. The miniature humanoid robots, which are about knee height, were able to make tackles, score goals and easily recover from falls when tripped. In order to learn how to play, AI researchers first used DeepMind’s state-of-the-art MuJoCo physics engine to train virtual versions of the robots in decades of match simulations. The simulated robots were rewarded if their movements led to improved performance, such as winning the ball from an opponent or scoring a goal. Once they were sufficiently capable of performing the basic skills, DeepMind researchers then transferred the AI into real-life versions of the bipedal bots, who were able to play one-on-one games of football against each other with no additional training required. “The trained soccer players exhibit robust and dynamic movement skills, such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more,” DeepMind noted in a blog post. “The agents also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. “Although the robots are inherently fragile, minor hardware modifications, together with basic regularisation of the behaviour during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way.” A paper detailing the research, titled ‘Learning agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning’, is currently under peer-review. Previous DeepMind research on football-playing AI has used different team set ups, increasing the number of players in order to teach simulated humanoids how to work as a team. The researchers say the work will not only advance coordination between AI systems, but also offer new pathways towards building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is of an equivalent or superiour level to humans. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity DeepMind boss says human-level AI is just a few years away Apple finally launches two professional apps on the iPad UK-based tech company claims quantum computing ‘breakthrough’

A mysterious golden object has been found at the bottom of the ocean by scientists exploring the Pacific Ocean and it has left them baffled. The discovery was made on 30 August when a team of experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were taking a closer look at an underwater volcano 250 miles off the coast of Alaska. Experts, and members of the public viewing the live stream, caught a glimpse of the unusual gold orb two miles beneath the surface lodged into the side of the volcano and were left puzzled over what it could be. It was found thanks to the NOAA’s Seascape Alaska 5 expedition that is currently mapping the seafloor of the Gulf of Alaska. Those who made the discovery at the foot of the volcano also noted there was a mysterious hole in the side of the orb, with one researcher suggesting on the live stream that “Something tried to get in...or to get out”. Scientists bantered back and forth about what the egg-like object could be and ultimately decided to take a sample that could be analysed. The texture of the orb was not as they had expected and was more of a silky, delicate consistency. An arm from the robotic vehicle was used to suction the orb in order for scientists to determine its origins with laboratory testing. The NOAA Seascape Alaska 5 expedition is due to end in mid-September and aims to fill the gaps that experts have about the sea beds off the USA’s west coast. It began on 24 August in Kodiak, Alaska and will come to an end in Seward, Alaska on 16 September. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.