The most secure RSA encryption can now be cracked using a smartphone or PC, according to a new highly-contested scientific paper.

Quantum-based systems promise faster computing and stronger encryption for computation and communication systems. These systems can be built on fiber networks involving interconnected nodes which consist of qubits and single-photon generators that create entangled photon pairs.

In this regard, rare-earth (RE) atoms and ions in solid-state materials are highly promising as single-photon generators. These materials are compatible with fiber networks and emit photons across a broad range of wavelengths. Due to their wide spectral range, optical fibers doped with these RE elements could find use in various applications, such as free-space telecommunication, fiber-based telecommunications, quantum random number generation, and high-resolution image analysis. However, so far, single-photon light sources have been developed using RE-doped crystalline materials at cryogenic temperatures, which limits the practical applications of quantum networks based on them.

In a study published in Physical Review Applied on 16 October 2023, a team of researchers from Japan, led by Associate Professor Kaoru Sanaka from Tokyo University of Science (TUS) has successfully developed a single-photon light source consisting of doped ytterbium ions (Yb³⁺) in an amorphous silica optical fiber at room temperature. This newly developed single-photon light source eliminates the need for expensive cooling systems and has the potential to make quantum networks more cost-effective and accessible.

Google has taken a significant step towards enhancing Chrome internet security by automatically upgrading insecure HTTP requests to HTTPS requests for 100% of users.

This feature is called HTTPS-Upgrades and will secure old links that utilize the http:// by automatically attempting to first connect to the URL over the encrypted https:// protocol.

A limited rollout of this feature in Google Chrome began in July, but as of October 16th, Google has now rolled it out to all users on the Stable channel.

If you wanted to, you could access an “evil” version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT today—though it’s going to cost you. It also might not necessarily be legal depending on where you live.

However, getting access is a bit tricky. You’ll have to find the right web forums with the right users. One of those users might have a post marketing a private and powerful large language model (LLM). You’ll connect with them on an encrypted messaging service like Telegram where they’ll ask you for a few hundred dollars in cryptocurrency in exchange for the LLM.

Once you have access to it, though, you’ll be able to use it for all the things that ChatGPT or Google’s Bard prohibits you from doing: have conversations about any illicit or ethically dubious topic under the sun, learn how to cook meth or create pipe bombs, or even use it to fuel a cybercriminal enterprise by way of phishing schemes.

Windows 11 Pro ships with a security feature that could severely hamper your solid-state drive’s performance. Fortunately, it is easy enough to turn off but some might not even know it is enabled by default.

BitLocker encryption in Windows 11 Pro is designed to safeguard data and ensure it is only accessible by authorized individuals, but it comes with a steep performance penalty. To find out how much of an impact it could have, Tom’s Hardware recently conducted tests under three scenarios: unencrypted (no BitLocker), software-enabled BitLocker (the Windows 11 Pro default), and hardware-based BitLocker.

The crew used a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD running Windows 11 Pro (22H2, with all patches installed) paired with an Intel Core i9-12900K and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM for testing.

On October 9, I moderated a panel on encryption, privacy policy, and human rights at the United Nations’s annual Internet Governance Forum. I shared the stage with some fabulous panelists including Roger Dingledine, the director of the Tor Project; Sharon Polsky, the president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada; and Rand Hammoud, a campaigner at Access Now, a human rights advocacy organization. All strongly believe in and champion the protection of encryption.

I want to tell you about one thing that came up in our conversation: efforts to, in some way, monitor encrypted messages.

Policy proposals have been popping up around the world (like in Australia, India, and, most recently, the UK) that call for tech companies to build in ways to gain information about encrypted messages, including through back-door access. There have also been efforts to increase moderation and safety on encrypted messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram, to try to prevent the spread of abusive content, like child sexual abuse material, criminal networking, and drug trafficking.

Not surprisingly, advocates for encryption are generally opposed to these sorts of proposals as they weaken the level of user privacy that’s currently guaranteed by end-to-end encryption.

In my prep work before the panel, and then in our conversation, I learned about some new cryptographic technologies that might allow for some content moderation, as well as increased enforcement of platform policies and laws, all *without* breaking encryption. These are sort-of fringe technologies right now, mainly still in the research phase. Though they are being developed in several different flavors, most of these technologies ostensibly enable algorithms to evaluate messages or patterns in their metadata to flag problematic material without having to break encryption or reveal the content of the messages.

I want to tell you about one thing that came up in our conversation: efforts to, in some way, monitor encrypted messages.

Policy proposals have been popping up around the world (like in Australia, India, and, most recently, the UK) that call for tech companies to build in ways to gain information about encrypted messages, including through back-door access. There have also been efforts to increase moderation and safety on encrypted messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram, to try to prevent the spread of abusive content, like child sexual abuse material, criminal networking, and drug trafficking.

Not surprisingly, advocates for encryption are generally opposed to these sorts of proposals as they weaken the level of user privacy that’s currently guaranteed by end-to-end encryption.

The future of human-machine interfaces is on the cusp of a revolution with the unveiling of a groundbreaking technology—a stretchable high-resolution multicolor synesthesia display that generates synchronized sound and light as input/output sources. A research team, led by Professor Moon Kee Choi in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST, has succeeded in developing this cutting-edge display using transfer-printing techniques, propelling the field of multifunctional displays into new realms of possibility.

The team’s research is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Traditionally, multifunctional displays have been confined to visualizing mechanical and electrical signals in light. However, this pioneering stretchable synesthesia display shatters preconceived boundaries by offering unparalleled optical performance and precise sound pressure levels. Its inherent stretchability ensures seamless operation under both static and dynamic deformation, preserving the integrity of the sound relative to the input waveform.

In a new Physical Review Letters study, scientists have successfully presented a proof of concept to demonstrate a randomness-free test for quantum correlations and non-projective measurements, offering a groundbreaking alternative to traditional quantum tests that rely on random inputs.

“Quantum correlation” is a fundamental phenomenon in quantum mechanics and one that is central to quantum applications like communication, cryptography, computing, and information processing.

Bell’s inequality, or Bell’s theory, named after physicist John Stewart Bell, is the standard test used to determine the nature of correlation. However, one of the challenges with using Bell’s theorem is the requirement of seed randomness for selecting measurement settings.

This surreal scenario is what would actually happen if the traffic light was a single atom illuminated by a laser beam, as recently shown experimentally by researchers in Berlin. They looked at the light scattered by an atom and saw that photons—the tiniest particles of light—arrived at the detector one at a time. The scientists blocked the brightest color they saw, and suddenly pairs of photons of two slightly different colors started arriving at their detector simultaneously. They reported their findings in Nature Photonics in July.

The reason for this counterintuitive effect is that single atoms are skilled little multitaskers. Through different underlying processes, they can scatter a variety of colors at the same time like a dangerous traffic light that shines all three colors at once. Yet because of quantum interference between these processes, an observer only sees one of the metaphorical traffic light’s colors at a time, preserving peace on the road.

This experiment also paves the way for novel quantum information applications. When the brightest color is blocked, the photons that pop up simultaneously are entangled with each other, behaving in sync even when they are separated over large distances. This provides a new tool for quantum communication and information processing in which entangled photon pairs can serve as distributed keys in quantum cryptography or store information in a quantum memory device.