IBM now has 18 quantum computers, an increase of three this quarter that underscores the company’s effort to benefit from a revolutionary type of computing. Dario Gil, head of IBM Research and a champion of its quantum computing effort, disclosed the number at the Big Blue’s Think conference Wednesday. Eighteen quantum computers might not sound …

Mozilla has beefed up Firefox Lockwise, its password management tool, to tell you when you’re making a more bonehead mistake than usual by reusing your passwords. Firefox already warned if a site you’re logging into has suffered a data breach. But in Firefox 76, released Tuesday, the browser now also tells you when you’re using that site’s password on another …

Google on Tuesday released a Chrome extension called Core Web Vitals that gives you a direct measurement for lodging complaints about slow websites. The tool accompanies a new push to get developers to focus on speed by measuring what Google’s Chrome team deems a useful collection of important data. For more than a decade, Google has pushed for a faster …

Tiny, supercheap Raspberry Pi computers have always been great for do-it-yourself projects, but with the addition of a new high-quality camera this week, they’re becoming a better foundation for projects like home security and monitoring backyard wildlife. The earlier 8-megapixel camera option was nothing special, but the new $50 Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera uses a 12-megapixel Sony IMX477 image …

USB 4, the next incarnation of the ubiquitous data-transfer technology, will be fast and versatile enough to let you plug a very high resolution 8K display in to your PC. That’s because it’ll accommodate DisplayPort 2.0, the newer version of a standard widely used to connect external monitors. The move, which industry groups announced Thursday, means USB will be a …

By packing the big A13 chip into its small iPhone SE, Apple has made its budget smartphone a more compelling product at just the right time for a coronavirus-spooked world. Where most budget phones cut costs by using lower-end processors, the new $400 iPhone SE uses the same flagship chip that powers the $1,450 iPhone 11 Pro Max, which launched last year. That …

For years, Google has placed prominent pop-up ads on its web properties suggesting people switch to Google’s Chrome browser, saying they’ll get better performance, features and security. Now Microsoft is trying the same idea, taking advantage of its email service to try to push people to its newly revamped Edge web browser. “Microsoft Edge + Outlook = Better together,” says …

Vivaldi now has built-in options for blocking online trackers and ads, a change of heart for a web browser-maker whose founder had hoped regulators would step in to protect privacy. The new features, designed to improve performance, too, are set to arrive Wednesday with the release of Vivaldi 3.0. The development of a version of Vivaldi for Android phones, the …

State and local governments are evaluating an MIT location-tracing app to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, an MIT researcher leading the app effort said Friday. “We have lots of pilots going on and lots of discussions,” said Ramesh Raskar, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s involved in creating the app, called Private Kit SafePaths. “There are many …

Some of the biggest names in encryption are developing a smartphone app they hope will tamp down the coronavirus pandemic without trampling privacy. Private Automated Contact Tracing, or PACT, is designed to let people figure out if they’ve been near others who’ve caught COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus. If you’ve tested positive, you can use the …