NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 14, 2023--

WhatsApp has announced a new feature that it says will “protect your most intimate conversations”. Chat Lock will allow users of the messaging app to take a chat thread from their inbox and put it in a new folder that can only be accessed by a password or biometric information, such as a fingerprint. Meta, the company’s owner, on Monday, said this would keep users’ conversations behind “one more layer of security” and has already started rolling it out. The content of messages in notifications will also be automatically hidden, the tech behemoth said. In a press release, Meta said: “We believe this feature will be great for people who share their phones from time to time with a family member, or in moments where someone else is holding your phone at the exact moment an extra-special chat arrives. “You can lock a chat by tapping the name of a one-to-one or group and selecting the lock option. To reveal these chats, slowly pull down on your inbox and enter your password or biometric.” It comes after warnings from WhatsApp that it could face being banned in the UK under the government’s online safety bill. Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp parent company Meta, said in late March that the upcoming legislation could weaken the end-to-end encryption that secures messages on the service. He added that if the government told the company to weaken any security features it would resist, leading to the possibility it could be banned in the UK." width="500"> Just last month it signed an open letter with its competitors, including Signal, arguing that the bill poses “an unprecedented threat to the privacy, safety and security of every UK citizen”. The row is over end-to-end encryption, used by WhatsApp, which allows only the sender and recipient to access the contents of a message. However, police and law enforcement agencies argue this feature makes it harder to uncover serious wrongdoing, such as child sexual abuse, and want to weaken the feature. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, said in a statement on Facebook: “New locked chats in WhatsApp make your conversations more private. “They’re hidden in a password-protected folder and notifications won’t show sender or message content.” Read More Creepy WhatsApp update sparks fears users are being listened to through their phone Government faces years of strike action from nurses, warns RCN chief Creepy WhatsApp update sparks fears users are being listened to through their phone WhatsApp just fixed two of its most glaring quirks Scientist spends 74 days underwater and expects to lose an inch in height

Cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. signed a deal to acquire Perimeter 81 for $490 million in

Microsoft has announced plans to build a quantum supercomputer after researchers said the next-generation machines will be able to outperform standard computers within the next two years. Quantum computers have the potential to be orders of magnitude more powerful than today’s leading supercomputers, but have so far failed to compete when it comes to practical tasks. A recent benchmark experiment from quantum computing researchers at IBM suggests that the machines will soon be able to perform useful calculations “at a scale where classical computers will struggle”, opening up a vast number of applications. “These machines are coming,” Sabrina Maniscalco, chief executive of quantum computing startup Algorithmiq, told the scientific journal Nature which published the research this month. Microsoft revealed its roadmap for building its first “quantum supercomputer” on Wednesday, following several years of research and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into the technology. Quantum computers work by replacing traditional bits – the ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ used to store and transfer digital data – with quantum bits, called qubits, that make use of a quantum phenomena known as superposition to exist in two states at once. This means they can serve as both a ‘one’ and a ‘zero’ simultaneously, so that each qubit added makes them exponentially more powerful than their traditional counterparts. Microsoft said it made its own breakthrough by engineering a new type of qubit, described in the journal Physical Review B on Wednesday, that is stable enough to work at scale on a quantum supercomputer. Microsoft describes a quantum supercomputer as one that can perform one million quantum operations per second, claiming its construction will be completed within the next decade. “Microsoft has achieved the first milestone towards creating a reliable and practical quantum supercomputer,” the firm wrote in a blog post detailing the roadmap. “Today marks an important moment on our path to engineering a quantum supercomputer and ultimately empowering scientists to solve many of the hardest problems facing our planet.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said it was his company’s goal “to compress the next 250 years of chemistry and materials science into the next 25.” The announcements from IBM and Microsoft follow several major quantum computing breakthroughs in recent years. In 2019, scientists at Google announced that they had achieved something known as quantum supremacy, when their Sycamore quantum computer was able to solve a problem in 200 seconds that would have taken the most powerful supercomputer in the world 10,000 years to solve. The milestone has since been repeated by researchers in China, whose quantum computer is able to perform computations nearly 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. While impressive, neither the Chinese machine nor Google’s Sycamore had any practical use. John Martinis, one of the Google researchers behind the 2019 milestone, said the latest news made him “optimistic that this will work in other systems and more complicated algorithms”. Read More Quantum computer discovers bizarre particle that remembers its past Quantum computing adopted by airlines and car makers in hunt for world's first commercial applications Breakthrough could soon allow us to actually use quantum computers, scientists say Elon Musk confirms cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg Apple starts letting developers make apps for its upcoming headset

Maria Sherman has been named The Associated Press’ music writer, a key position responsible for delivering news on a beat of global significance for the news cooperative

HONG KONG China's internet giant Tencent Holdings said that it will unveil an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot on

MORRIS PLAINS, N.J. & ALISO VIEJO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 21, 2023--

COPENHAGEN, Denmark--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 30, 2023--

For the first time since 2011, Spotify confirms a price hike for about 200m ad-free subscribers.

Guerrilla Games is celebrating the impressive sales of 'Horizon Forbidden West'.

Wipro Ltd., the Indian outsourcing provider, plans to spend $1 billion to train its 250,000 employees in artificial

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