Something Has To Change For 500 Million Windows Users

More than 500 million Windows 10 PC owners cannot upgrade to Windows 11 and now risk a security nightmare. Google says it has the answer, confirming a free PC upgrade for all those users. And it’s available now.

"You can transform your aging, unsupported laptop into a fast, secure, and sustainable machine for free," Google says. The offer is to "upgrade" your PC to ChromeOS Flex. "Refresh the devices that you already own at no cost with a modern, cloud-based operating system that’s secure and easy to manage.

While this offer has been available for a while, it’s now easier than ever to take it up. "Starting today, a new ChromeOS Flex USB Kit is available," Google has just announced. Its new partnership with Back Market "helps you install our fast, secure and free operating system to modernize the PC or Mac you already own."

Google says Microsoft’s decision to end-of-life Windows 10 last October "left many people with a difficult decision: spend hundreds on a new device, or continue using an insecure, outdated one." Windows 11’s infamously slow take-up meant more Windows users on a retired OS than ever before.

Microsoft continues to offer a free extended support update (ESU) program for any Windows 10 user, albeit that only runs to October this year. After that you’re out of support, unless you work for an organization with an enterprise plan in place.

While the ChromeOS Flex "upgrade" is free, the USB kit is not. "This physical kit, priced around US$ 3 or €3," Google says, "is reusable, and our partnership with Closing the Loop further minimizes e-waste."

Avoiding e-waste is the other theme here, as well as securing hundreds of millions of devices. The threat of hundreds of millions of PCs becoming unusable has created headlines as various waste organizations calculate the landfill impact.

"The manufacturing process of a new laptop is responsible for a large part of its carbon footprint," Google says. "ChromeOS Flex allows the already-manufactured device to be used for longer, which keeps hardware out of landfills and avoids the emissions of making a new device. Savings do not stop there, ChromeOS also consumes 19% less energy on average than other comparable systems."

Whether it’s time to move from Windows to Chrome is a contentious decision to say the least. The situation for Windows 10 users with PCs that cannot run Windows 11 is perilous. This is at least a solution. Even if you buy a new machine, you can still upgrade your old one, perhaps for a younger family member.

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How To Change Your Cringey Gmail Address And Still Retain Its Content?

It is now official. All Gmail users can change their cringey email addresses to a more formal and respectable one.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the news in a recent X post that "2004 was a good year, but your Gmail address doesn't need to be stuck in it."

The feature is rolling out to users in stages, so while it’s not currently available to all Gmail users, it should be available to all users soon, according to Google.

To see if the feature is currently available to you, simply click on the circle with your photo or initials in the top right-hand corner of your Gmail and click "Manage your Google Account."

From there, click on "Personal info" on the left side of the page, then click on "Email."

Click on your current Gmail address (you will be prompted to enter your password), and you will then see an option to change your Google account email if it is currently an option for you to do so.

Google says that emails sent to your old email address will still appear in the inbox of your new one. Additionally, you can sign in with your old or new email address on Google services, like Maps, YouTube and Drive.

Your data, like photos and emails, will not be affected when you create a new Gmail address.

Google also says that while you can change back to your previous email address at any time, you cannot create a new Google Account email ending in gmail.com for the next 12 months.

2004 was a good year, but your Gmail address doesn't need to be stuck in it.

To say goodbye to v0t3f0rp3dr02004@gmail.com or mrbrightside416@gmail.com (or whatever you were into at the time), go to your Google Account settings and choose any name available. You'll keep your old…

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) March 31, 2026

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Google Researchers Imposes Expiration Date On Bitcoin

A team of Google researchers just set a new date for post-quantum cryptography migration: the year 2029. Among other things, this means that Bitcoin, as well as many other cryptocurrencies, needs to adopt new cryptographic techniques that are resilient to quantum attacks within three years.

Google announced the new timeline in a blog post. "Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures," the post said.

In terms of actual science, two important papers were published on 30 March. One is signed by Google researchers, the other by a startup called Oratomic (with ex-Googlers and Caltech folks on board). The papers are a dense read for anyone who's not an expert in cryptography, but can be simplified to this: They describe new ways to break some very important cryptographic systems using quantum computers, with far fewer resources (10x) than previously thought.

This is relevant for Bitcoin because it makes it far more likely that someone can build a quantum computer capable of deriving a Bitcoin private key from a Bitcoin public key. In fact, so much more likely that Google decided not to show the actual quantum circuits they used to do this, instead showing a mathematical proof that this is possible.

Justin Drake, one of the researchers that co-signed the Google paper, has a good overview. "A superconducting quantum computer, the type Google is building, could crack keys in minutes," he wrote.

Important point: As Adam Back, an important Bitcoin expert, pointed out, Bitcoin (the network) does not use encryption. What Google has found doesn't mean someone can intercept transactions on the Bitcoin network; instead, they could crack someone's private key, and when you have someone's private key, you have their coins.

In fact, it's a bit more complex than that. The two papers above reference Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm developed by Peter Shor back in 1994, that makes it a lot faster to break certain types of encryption with quantum computers.

Shor's algorithm could be used to derive a Bitcoin private key from a public key, but only in certain cases. This includes some old Bitcoin addresses, including those used by Bitcoin's elusive creator Satoshi Nakamoto himself; this is notable, as these addresses hold over one million bitcoins, meaning that the potential prize for someone cracking them is in the tens of billions of dollars (not to mention the havoc it would cause on the network as everyone scrambled to figure what's next).

Newer addresses can also be cracked, but not until they're broadcasted within a transaction, meaning there's a short (typically 10-minute long) window in which someone could use Shor's algorithm to get that private key. No known quantum computer that could do this exists right now, even considering the optimizations found by Google and Oratomic researchers. But it's not unfathomable that someone builds it in the future.

Bitcoin is traditionally slow to make any changes. Adam Back, in particular, advised in 2025 that "some quantum readiness" should be added in the next five years, though he said he's not expecting it to be used "in a few decades."

In contrast, the new papers demonstrate that the quantum threat for Bitcoin is much closer than that, and that serious action should probably be taken now.

What can be done? Google's paper suggest ways in which blockchains (including Bitcoin) could mitigate the issue. This includes simple steps such as moving coins from old addresses to new ones if possible, but also updating protocols to include post-quantum cryptography. This process is not easy for large, established cryptocurrency networks, and it may take years to even agree on a best solution (an internal strife over block size on Bitcoin's network took about two years to resolve), let alone implement it.

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Austria Plans To Ban Social Media For Children

Austria is the latest country to announced that it plans to ban social media for children aged under 14.

It follows lengthy negotiations within the conservative-led three-party coalition government, but it is not yet clear how or when the ban will be implemented.

Announcing the plans, Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler of the Social Democrats said the government could not stand by and watch as social media made children "addicted and also often ill".

He said it was the responsibility of politicians to protect children and argued that the issue should be treated no different to alcohol or tobacco: "There must be clear rules in the digital world too."

In future, said Babler, children under 14 would be protected from algorithms that were addictive.

"Other information providers have clear rules to protect young people from harmful content." These, he said, should now be implemented in the digital space.

Austria is the latest among a growing number of countries to consider restricting social media access for children, citing concerns about potentially harmful content made available to them on the platforms.

In a landmark case in the US on Wednesday, a jury found two social media giants had intentionally built addictive algorithms that harmed young people's mental health.

Social media companies point to under-13s being disallowed from joining their platforms - though questions remain about how strictly this is enforced - and versions of their sites with parental controls when challenged on questions of harm.

Australia introduced a ban for under-16s in December, becoming the first nation to do so.

France's lower house approved a ban for under-15s in January. In a post on X French President Emmanuel Macron thanked Austria for "joining the movement".

The UK government has launched a consultation on banning social media for under-16s, while Denmark, Greece, Spain and Ireland are also considering similar moves: Spain and Ireland for under-16s, and Denmark and Greece for under-15s.

Austrian Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr, from the liberal Neos party, stressed the "harmful" nature of social media, adding: "People need to learn how to use it responsibly."

The state secretary for digitalisation, Alexander Pröll, from the conservative ÖVP, said that a draft bill codifying the ban would be presented by the end of June.

The bill is expected to contain technical details of an agreed mechanism to verify people's ages when accessing social media platforms. Babler said Austria could use an EU system if it was ready, but that it would pursue a national plan if not.

The general secretary of the far-right opposition Freedom Party, Christian Hafenecker, condemned the plans as "a direct attack on young people's freedom of expression and freedom of information".

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AI Videos Sexualizing Black Women Removed By TikTok

TikTok has banned 20 accounts after the BBC featured the use of AI-generated black female influencers to drive users to sites promoting sexually explicit content.

They are part of a growing trend of accounts on Instagram and TikTok that has been criticized as racist, exploitative and misleading because of racial tropes and language used.

The BBC and researchers from the independent AI publication Riddance found dozens of accounts on the two platforms featuring highly sexualized black female digital characters or avatars.

The images and videos were generated by AI but not labelled as such, in apparent breach of the platforms' guidelines.

Nearly all the accounts were on Instagram and about a third also had versions on TikTok. Instagram's parent company Meta told the BBC it was investigating, but did not say it had taken any action.

The avatars are often shown dressed in skimpy swimwear or other revealing clothing and portrayed with exaggerated body shapes.

Some have exceptionally dark skin tones that have been digitally manipulated, giving them an artificial appearance.

Account names include terms such as "black", "noir", "dark" and "ebony". Several include comments about white males in their posts, such as "loves white men" and "why I need a white guy in my life". Many of the accounts follow or like each other.

The BBC, working in collaboration with analysts Jeremy Carrasco and Angel Nulani from Riddance, has identified 60 such accounts, mainly on Instagram, that have carried links, or chains of links, to paid-for sexually explicit content on third-party sites. The sites labelled the imagery as AI-generated, but the Instagram accounts did not.

The research also identified many more accounts on both Instagram and TikTok with similar AI-generated avatars that did not link to paid content.

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