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"…in about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore's Law. In fact, already, we see a slowing down of Moore's Law. Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology. - Dr. Michio Kaku - 2012"

"These exploits are based on chip engineering flaws, not on software flaws. Apple, Google, Abode, Microsoft, and other software companies didn't write poor software or bad Operating Systems to cause these problems to occur. Rather, the chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD and ARM - designed and then engineered computer chips with flaws built into them. Once discovered, those flaws allow the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to be run. Worse, these chips have been sold with consumer computers, servers and mobile devices since 1995. so the impact is, potentially, both personal and global in scope."

"Three-Dimensional Computer Simulations Have Solved The Mystery Of Why Doomed Stars Explode"

"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."

"There will be more where that came from. So it's time for a reality check. Quantum computers are interesting, but experience so far suggests they are exceedingly tricky to build and even harder to scale up. There are now about 50 working machines, most of them minuscule in terms of qubits. The biggest is one of IBM's, which has - wait for it - 433 qubits, which means scaling up to 20m qubits might, er, take a while. This will lead realists to conclude that RSA encryption is safe for the time being and critics to say that it's like nuclear fusion and artificial general intelligence - always 50 years in the future."

"The folks at Signal are taking one of the four post-quantum cryptography algorithms that have been chosen by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to withstand attacks by quantum computers, but instead of using it to replace their existing public-key encryption system, they are layering the new algorithm on top of what they already have. "We are augmenting our existing cryptosystems," they say, "such that an attacker must break both systems in order to compute the keys protecting people's communications." And they will be rolling out this augmented system to all users in the next few months."

"But on the downside it has led to a loss of face-to-face contact, which can have negative consequences, particularly when it comes to education. What's more, there are also health impacts to consider. New scientific research indicates that spending large amounts of time in front of the computer, or other devices such as tablets and cell phones, can be harmful to our health. This is largely due to the blue light emitted by electronic devices, which expose us to light-emitting diodes (LEDs)."

"computer programs can accelerate discovery in the sciences faster than scientists can, if the computer is trained to behave like one"

"Google released a beta test version of its Chrome browser that attempts to keep your data secure even if today's uncrackable encryption becomes tomorrow's code-breaking cakewalk. The Chrome 54 beta gets the ability to encipher data sent to and from websites with a technology called CECPQ1. It "protects against future attacks using large quantum computers," Google said in a blog post Thursday."

"A month after a hospital in Hollywood was shut down by a ransomware infection that encrypted all the files on its computers and computer-controlled instruments and systems, another hospital, this one in Kentucky, has suffered a similar fate. "

"demonstrate a fiendishly clever procedure for getting data off of airgapped computers that have had their speakers removed to prevent acoustic data-transmission: instead of playing sound through the target computer's speakers, they attack its fans, varying their speeds to produce subtle sounds that humans can barely notice, but which nearby devices can pick up through their microphones."

""No-limit Texas Hold'em is a game of incomplete information where the AI must infer a human player's intentions and then act in ways that incorporate both the direct odds of winning and bluffing behaviour to try to fool the other player." The designers said their computer didn't "bluff" the human players. But by learning from its mistakes and practising its moves at night between games, the AI was working out how to defeat its human opponents."

"Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the system software used in millions of computers, opening the possibility that attackers could execute arbitrary commands on web servers, other Linux-based machines and even Mac computers."

"First, the journalists working with the documents. I've handled some of the Snowden documents myself, and even though I'm a paranoid cryptographer, I know how difficult it is to maintain perfect security. It's been open season on the computers of the journalists Snowden shared documents with since this story broke in July 2013. And while they have been taking extraordinary pains to secure those computers, it's almost certainly not enough to keep out the world's intelligence services."

Great article - worth a read through...

"iTunes phishing scams Compromised phones or computers Celebrity passwords/emails as part of a larger password dump (such as the Adobe hack) Mobile-phone or computer-repair individuals abusing access Password reset questions guess Brute force"

"One of the most mind-bending far future predictions you'll hear from some futurists is this: Eventually, the technology will exist to copy your brain (every bit of data that makes you, you) onto a computer. Technical details and exact predictions aside (the concept is still firmly science fiction) mind uploading makes for a fascinating and disturbing thought experiment. If you had the power to upload yourself, would you?"

"Regin is a tool capable of infecting and compromising entire networks, not just individual computers, as security companies Symantec and Kaspersky Labs detailed in their technical reports published on Sunday and Monday. It's not only a computer virus or malware, but also a toolkit or platform that can be used for different purposes, depending on the needs of the attackers. It can collect passwords, retrieve deleted files, and even take over entire networks and infrastructures, according to researchers. "

"No arguments there, but the term, which stands for "artificial intelligence", has a more storied history than Spielberg and Kubrick's 2001 film. The concept of artificial intelligence goes back to the birth of computing: in 1950, just 14 years after defining the concept of a general-purpose computer, Alan Turing asked "Can machines think?""

"Quantum computing may offer potential benefits to the financial services industry, but it also poses risks. Banks rely on encryption to keep their transactions and customer data secure. This involves scrambling and unscrambling data using keys made of very large numbers - tens, if not hundreds, of digits long."