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Computer insecurity

Many current computer systems have only limited security precautions in place. Serious financial damage has been caused by computer security breaches, but reliably estimating costs is quite difficult. Figures in the billions of dollars have been quoted in relation to the damage caused by malware such as computer worms like the Code Red worm, but such estimates may be exaggerated. However, other losses, such as those caused by the compromise of credit card information, can be more easily determined, and they have been substantial, as measured by millions of individual victims of identity theft each year in each of several nations, and the severe hardship imposed on each victim.

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Computers & Math News

February 2, 2026

NASA’s Perseverance rover has just made history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners, ...
A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already ...
Scientists warn that rapid advances in AI and neurotechnology are outpacing our understanding of consciousness, creating serious ethical risks. New research argues that developing scientific tests ...
Dinosaur footprints have always been mysterious, but a new AI app is cracking their secrets. DinoTracker analyzes photos of fossil tracks and predicts which dinosaur made them, with accuracy rivaling human experts. Along the way, it uncovered ...
Researchers have discovered a hidden quantum geometry inside materials that subtly steers electrons, echoing how gravity warps light in space. Once thought to exist only on paper, this effect has now been observed experimentally in a popular quantum ...
Order doesn’t always form perfectly—and those imperfections can be surprisingly powerful. In materials like liquid crystals, tiny “defects” emerge when symmetry breaks, shaping everything ...
Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum ...
AI may learn better when it’s allowed to talk to itself. Researchers showed that internal “mumbling,” combined with short-term memory, helps AI adapt to new tasks, switch goals, and handle complex challenges more easily. This approach boosts ...
Quantum technology has reached a turning point, echoing the early days of modern computing. Researchers say functional quantum systems now exist, but scaling them into truly powerful machines will require major advances in engineering and ...
Researchers have demonstrated that quantum entanglement can link atoms across space to improve measurement accuracy. By splitting an entangled group of atoms into separate clouds, they were able to measure electromagnetic fields more precisely than ...
A massive new study comparing more than 100,000 people with today’s most advanced AI systems delivers a surprising result: generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests. Models like GPT-4 showed strong performance on ...
Blockchain could make smart devices far more secure, but sluggish data sharing has held it back. Researchers found that messy network connections cause massive slowdowns by flooding systems with duplicate data. Their new “Dual Perigee” method ...

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