Public Wi-Fi Is A Threat To Data Security

Millions of users are still connecting their phones to networks that can expose passwords and financial data in seconds. Google and U.S. security agencies have already warned about the risk. But new data now shows the threat is getting worse.

"Avoid using public Wi-Fi whenever possible," Google warns, "as these networks can be unencrypted and easily exploited by attackers." Despite this, a new mobile security report shows millions are still connecting anyway. And when the device is a work phone, that risk doesn’t stop with you.

In its 2026 mobile threat report covering Android and iOS, Jamf reports that 18 percent of employees still "connect to risky hotspots (which) open the door to infrastructure threats like rogue access points or Adversary-in-the-Middle attacks." That’s especially true "if devices are not configured to address this risk."

Almost all phones are not.

In cybersecurity, this advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is almost as contentious as the advice to avoid public charging points. The reality though, is that cyber experts pouring scorn on warnings from these tech firms will have set their phones up properly, will always apply updates, and are less likely to fall victim to attacks.

For normal users, the risks are much higher. Jamf also warns that in more than half of organizations, "at least one device has a critically out-of-date operating system. An out-of-date OS means unpatched, exploitable vulnerabilities. Automating and enforcing updates goes a long way to protect your devices."

America’s NSA says "accessing public Wi-Fi hotspots may be convenient to catch up on work or check email, but public Wi-Fi is often not configured securely. Using these networks may make users’ data and devices more vulnerable to compromise, as cyber actors employ malicious access points, redirect to malicious websites, inject malicious proxies, and eavesdrop on network traffic."

Even TSA has warned travelers to avoid these networks. "Don’t use free public Wi-Fi," especially "if you’re planning to make any online purchases." TSA also warns you should "never enter any sensitive info while using unsecured Wi-Fi."

"Networks and web risks threaten even the most secure devices," Jamf warns. "Without proper configuration, your data is exposed. Phishing and other web risks continue to run rampant. Attackers mimic popular sites across multiple categories of online content: entertainment, business, utility and finance. And users fall for them every day, especially as generative AI helps attackers advance techniques."

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Why Are Page Views and Impressions Important To Online Creators?

For bloggers, vloggers, and online creators, page views and impressions are very important. They are both widely used used terms in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and they are mostly being used while analyzing the web analytics.

Well, there are people who are confused in both these terms, so here is the basic difference for them. Page Views is a condition which denotes the number of times a particular page is being viewed whereas impressions denote the number of times an element on a web page is viewed.

When a web user visits on the page of the website, it counts as one pageview and each visitor who is visiting the website will have at least one pageview. If the same visitor clicks on another page and that comes into search then it will also be counted as a pageview.

When the monthly report of the particular website is being analyzed after the month end, then an average number of pageviews per visitor is divided by the total number of views by the number of unique visitors. This analysis gives the exact count of the page views.

According to the pageview count, be it low or high, the SEO department decides to make an amendment and further strategy to run the website. If the page view count is lower than the expectation, then certainly there is something confusing for the visitor, it may be design, content or site navigation that doesn’t make it user-friendly.

Impression is different than pageview. Impressions refer to the number of times a visitor look into a specific element of a page, be it an image, text, video or content. Impressions are usually calculated to know that how much an advertiser needs to pay to advertise his ad on the website and as it is based on the advertisements. Each time a person loads a page then their ad appears and it is counted as one impression for the individual. Impressions are calculated in sets of 1,000.

Both pageviews and impressions are very important and they are easy to calculate a website’s success. When the count of pageview gets low then it certainly indicates the problem such as poor website design, call to action, poor quality content or bad search engine optimization. Such kind of an analysis helps the professionals to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and find the area of improvement.

On the other hand, the impressions calculation helps the company to decide how many advertisements can give them benefit, so to how many numbers of people are left to pitch for the same and convince the existing clients to stay back for the better results.

The procedure of tracking pageview and impressions is very simple. It is being done through web analytics program like Google Analytics. One needs to sing up an account and insert the piece of code that is generated by the tool and also fill all the details of the business into the website analytic account and regularly keeps checking the track of the website. The code inserted into the website will keep on checking all kinds of behavior and make people analyze what to do next and how. In this way, people can enhance their business by working on diverse behavior calculated by the web analytics.

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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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