PCWorld April 2016

Tech and trends that will affect you today and beyond. Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/obamasxsw PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA can’t comment on the specifics of the ongoing feud between Apple and the FBI, but he did sit down with Texas Tribune editor-in-chief Evan Smith at the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive to weigh in on one of the most pressing issues facing American society today: Is national security more important than privacy in the digital age? “The question we now have to ask is if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong there’s no key, there’s no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?” Obama said. “If you can’t crack that [device]…

MUCH OF THE ENCRYPTION WORLD today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they’ve created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes. In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or “qubits,” that can be simultaneously 0 and 1—a state known as a superposition that’s far more efficient. It typically takes about 12 qubits to factor the number 15, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria have found a way to pare that down to five qubits, each represented by a single atom, they recently said. Using laser pulses to keep the quantum system stable by holding the atoms in an ion trap, the…

OPERA FIRED A BROADSIDE in the web content wars, becoming the first desktop web browser with built-in ad blocking—and explicitly encouraging users to turn it on to improve their browsing experiences. Competing browsers like Chrome or Firefox assign plug-ins like AdBlock Plus the task of blocking ads. But with Opera’s 37.0.2162.0 developer build for Mac OS and Windows, it’s baked right into the software. Opera says that turning on the ad-blocking feature can cut page load times by a whopping 90 percent, which PCWorld confirmed using a test build. According to Krystian Kolondra, the senior vice president in charge of engineering for Opera, the current approach to advertising is damaging users’ online experiences. “Our goal is to provide the fastest and the smoothest online experience for our users,” he said in an…

Watch the video at go.pcworld.com/hpelitex3vid IT’S A HELL of a time to launch a Windows phone, and yet that’s exactly what HP did at this year’s Mobile World Congress, when it debuted its Elite x3 flagship. This premium-level device enters a wasteland littered with failed phones, an ecosystem that, at last report, clings to just one percent of the worldwide market. Despite the clear and significant risks, HP seems to have a reasonable strategy: Make it a beautiful, powerful device. Sell it into the cash-rich, Windows-centric corporate world. Finally, emphasize Continuum (go.pcworld.com/w10continuum), that standout feature in Windows 10 Mobile, the one thing its rivals Android and iOS can’t touch. Just settle a Windows 10 phone into a special dock, and it can control a connected display and input devices, acting much like a…

ASUS WAS BUSY downsizing its graphics cards recently, but in a good way. The company revealed two new versions of Nvidia’s GTX 950 (go.pcworld.com/gtx950) that are ideal for PCs with paltry power supplies and anyone rocking an HTPC with a mini-ITX motherboard. Neither build sacrifices the basic specs of the GTX 950, but they do follow the lead of the older GTX 750 Ti (go.pcworld.com/gtx750ti) and sip all their power from the motherboard PCIe connection—no extra power pin connections required. The first new card is the Asus GTX 950-2G (go.pcworld.com/asusgtx9502g) (pictured on top above), which lacks the 6-pin power connection required by the stock GTX 950 models by limiting its TDP to 75 watts, the amount provided by a motherboard’s PCIe slot. Nvidia’s standard design for the 950 requires a power…

IT TOOK 1.4 MILLION MILES for Google’s self-driving cars to learn that people can be terrible drivers—even people operating the city bus. “We don’t like cars bumping into things,” Chris Urmson, Director of Google’s Self-Driving Project, told the audience during his recent SXSW panel. Back in February, one of Google’s cars got into an accident with a bus while trying to get back on the road from a right turn lane. The car estimated that there was not enough space for the bus to get through so assumed the bus driver was going to stop and let the car through. “The car made an assumption about what the bus driver was going to do, and the bus driver made an assumption about what the car was going to do, and the assumptions did…