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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Humans Are Not The Only Users Of The Internet

It was recently reported that automated traffic on the internet grew nearly eight times faster than human traffic in 2025. The more important shift isn’t the volume — it’s what that automation is actually doing now.

For years, the bot problem was mostly a nuisance. Scrapers grabbed pricing data. Crawlers hoovered up content. Credential stuffers hammered login pages. Those are still real problems. But the nature of automated traffic has changed, and most organizations’ security thinking hasn’t caught up.

AI agents aren’t just reading the web anymore. They’re transacting on it.

A new benchmark report from Human Security, which analyzed more than one quadrillion interactions across its customer base in 2025, puts numbers to the shift. Monthly AI-driven traffic volumes grew 187 percent from January to December. Agentic AI traffic—systems that browse, fill forms, manage accounts and complete purchases on behalf of users—grew 7,851 percent year over year.

An AI agent completing a checkout isn’t just browsing. It’s making a financial decision on behalf of a human user, interacting with payment systems and account infrastructure. The security implications are fundamentally different from a scraper reading your product pages.

Tony Bradkey of Forbes had an opportunity to chat with Todd Thiemann, cybersecurity industry analyst with Omdia, about what that shift means for security teams. His framing was direct: "AI agents hold the promise of improving efficiency and productivity, but those new identities need to be managed and secured for compliance reasons, for cybersecurity reasons and to facilitate growth of the business."

AI agents aren’t just another traffic type to classify. They’re a new category of entity that can act, decide and commit—and most enterprise identity frameworks weren’t built with them in mind.

Security teams have spent years asking one question: is this traffic from a bot or a human? That framing made sense when bots were mostly adversarial and humans were mostly legitimate. It doesn’t hold anymore.

An AI agent browsing product pages, logging into an account and completing a purchase is doing exactly what a sophisticated bot attack looks like. The behavior is functionally identical. The difference is intent—and intent doesn’t show up in a user-agent string.

Across all the interactions analyzed, only half of one percent separates benign automation from malicious automation. Organizations that block all automation will turn away legitimate agentic commerce. Those that allow it unchecked absorb fraud. The real question isn’t whether traffic is automated—it’s whether a given interaction is trustworthy.

Threat actors are targeting the same surfaces where agentic AI operates: product pages, account management flows and checkout. That overlap isn’t coincidental.

Post-login account compromise attempts more than quadrupled in 2025, averaging 402,000 per organization. Login-point defenses have improved enough that attackers now wait until after authentication, abusing session tokens and exploiting weak step-up controls rather than forcing their way through the front door.

Scraping attacks now account for nearly 20 percent of global web traffic at the median — nearly double the rate in 2022. For heavily targeted organizations, it exceeds 60 percent. Carding volume is up 250 percent over the same period.

Researchers have already documented AI agents executing carding attacks—cycling through card additions and payment attempts via agentic browsers, mirroring established fraud workflows without manual effort. The same tools built to help consumers shop are proving equally useful for fraud.

The spoofing problem compounds this. Attackers masquerade as recognized AI crawlers — claiming to be ChatGPT, Mistral, or Perplexity bots — to exploit the trust organizations extend to those names. Whitelisting based solely on user-agent strings grants access to actors who aren’t who they claim to be. And the same company can operate crawlers, scrapers and agentic systems simultaneously, so operator-level access decisions don’t map cleanly to behavior. Declared identity is the starting point, not the answer.

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