Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy Scientists say ordinary WiFi routers may soon be able to secretly recognize and track people with near-perfect accuracy. - Date: - May 22, 2026 - Source: - Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) - Summary: - Scientists in Germany have demonstrated a startling new form of surveillance: identifying people using nothing more than ordinary WiFi signals. By analyzing how radio waves bounce around a room, researchers can effectively âseeâ and recognize individuals â even if they are not carrying a device and even if their phone is turned off. - Share: Researchers in Germany are warning that ordinary WiFi networks could become a powerful new form of invisible surveillance. Using standard wireless signals and artificial intelligence, they demonstrated a system capable of identifying people with striking accuracy, even if those individuals are not carrying an active device. "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL -- KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability. "This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition," explains the cybersecurity expert. "Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not." Turning off your smartphone is not enough to avoid detection. According to the researchers, nearby wireless devices connected to the network still generate enough signal activity for the system to work. WiFi Routers Could Become Hidden Surveillance Tools The team says the technology could transform everyday routers into quiet monitoring systems that operate without attracting attention. "This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance," warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. "If you regularly
May 23, 2026 · via sciencedaily.com
A cryptographically relevant quantum computer, or CRQC, is a machine powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm at the scale needed to break the public-key cryptography that secures almost all digital communication. No such machine exists in 2026, and the largest quantum computers are still many generations short of one. Yet the prospect already drives a global migration to post-quantum cryptography, because data stolen today can be decrypted once a CRQC arrives. This guide explains what a cryptographically relevant quantum computer requires, which companies are closest, what the experts expect, and how to prepare. 1. No CRQC exists yet. Breaking RSA-2048 needs thousands of error-corrected logical qubits running deep circuits, and the best machines today field only dozens of logical qubits. The gap is large. 2. The bar keeps moving. Better algorithms have cut the estimated physical-qubit cost of breaking RSA-2048 from around 20 million to under a million, so the threshold is getting easier to reach even before hardware catches up. 3. The mid-2030s is the consensus window. Most surveyed experts put a meaningful probability on a cryptographically relevant quantum computer appearing within a decade, with the heaviest weight around 2030 to 2035. 4. Harvest now, decrypt later is the live threat. Adversaries can store encrypted data today and decrypt it once a CRQC exists, which puts long-lived secrets at risk right now. 5. The fix is already standardised. The United States finalised post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, and the migration to them is the practical defence against the quantum threat. 6. Watch logical qubits, not physical ones. Roadmaps from IBM, Google, Quantinuum, IonQ and PsiQuantum should be judged on error-corrected logical qubits, the real measure of progress toward a CRQC. What is a cryptographically relevant quantum computer? A cryptographically relevant quantum computer is defined by capability rather than size,
May 23, 2026 · via quantumzeitgeist.com
'We are putting quantum inside the rack so customers can roll it in, plug it in': The world’s first rack-mounted quantum computer is here — and it runs at -459 degrees Fahrenheit from a standard wall socket Equal1 and Dell launch the world's first rack-mounted quantum computer for enterprises - Equal1 and Dell's RacQ is the world’s first rack-mounted quantum computer for enterprise use - It operates from a standard single-phase 1.6kW wall socket - The system uses a built-in close-cycle cryocooler, eliminating the need for external cryogenic plumbing Equal1 and Dell have come together to launch what they are calling, “the world’s first deployable silicon-spin hybrid quantum-classical computer,” built specifically to fit within the existing data center form factor. Announced at Dell Technologies World 2026, the new prototype will fit inside a standard 19-inch data center rack, which means existing infrastructure wouldn’t have to be upgraded to accommodate future deployments. Though not a commercially ready product, Equal1 is framing the news as a major development whereby quantum computers will be suitable for enterprise deployment, beyond current research lab limitations. A quantum computer which will fit where your classical computers already are The entire solution is designed to meet enterprises where they are, with the rack units they already have, a standard power delivery and conventional networking architecture. For example, Equal1’s RacQ can be plugged into a standard single-phase 1.6kW wall socket and operate without external cryogenic plumbing. The company says the 1,600W power consumption roughly resembles that of a high-end classical compute server or GPU-heavy enterprise system. It also uses an integrated close-cycle cryocooler designed to maintain an internal operating temperature of 0.3 Kelvin (-459 degrees Fahrenheit), so the type of dilution refrigerator required by today’s quantum computers would not be necessary. Powering RacQ is UnityQ, a quantum system-on-chip
May 23, 2026 · via techradar.com
Rigetti Computing (RGTI +19.94%) stock is seeing another round of huge gains in Friday's trading. The quantum computing company's share price was up 22.8% as of 1 p.m. ET. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite were each up 0.4% at the same point in the daily session. Rigetti stock had been up as much as 26.4% earlier in the day. Along with bullish momentum for the broader market today, Rigetti Computing's valuation is getting another boost from yesterday's news that some leading quantum-computing dare set to receive funding through the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. As of this writing, Rigetti Computing is now up roughly 19% in 2026. CHIPS Act funding has been a bullish catalyst for Rigetti In a press release published yesterday, Rigetti announced that it had signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce to secure an investment of up to $100 million. The funding will be used to accelerate the company's development of quantum technologies and is on track to be dispersed over three years. In exchange for the funding, Rigetti will sell new shares of its stock to the Department of Commerce. NASDAQ: RGTI Key Data Points What's next for Rigetti? In a note published this morning, TD Cowen stated that it viewed Rigetti as one of the three biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. Department of Commerce's investments in quantum computing. The other two companies on its list were D-Wave Quantum and GlobalFoundries. TD Cowen's analysts said that the Department of Commerce's investment moves "underscore the strategic value" of the quantum computing industry. With Rigetti and other quantum-computing players receiving another significant vote of confidence from the U.S. government, the industry's growth opportunities could continue becoming increasingly legitimate and attractive in the eyes of investors.
May 23, 2026 · via fool.com
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May 23, 2026 · via youtube.com
The importance of Post-Quantum Cryptography for eID documents Quantum computing is, for most, still a technology that’s out of reach. Restricted to a handful of commercial research labs and universities around the world, they are not yet a mainstream prospect. But with these computers expected to become a more accessible tool by the early 2030s, they pose several risks to electronic identity documents as we currently use them today. Cryptography is what allows us to protect sensitive data and communications and is foundational to how our modern world works. The power of quantum computing, deployed in a brute force manner, means that the resilience of many of the algorithms we’ve used for decades to protect data is now under question. Current mechanisms used for authentication, digital signatures and trust chains in identity documents are particularly vulnerable because they rely on asymmetric cryptography like RSA and ECC. Also known as public key cryptography, these mechanisms work by creating a pair of keys - one public and one private. Anyone can use a public key to encrypt data, but only the holders of the corresponding private key can decrypt that data. Although slower and more resource intensive than their symmetric equivalents, asymmetric approaches are used when security is paramount, such as securing communications within an open system, or encrypting sensitive data. | Rising fraud threat and trust erosion For governments designing, deploying and managing electronic identity schemes, the prospect of the encryption it relies on being broken is a huge challenge to the trust these systems depend on. Threat actors could use it to break government signature keys, and forge valid false electronic citizen profiles. They could also break ID authentication keys and access confidential data stored in the identity documents. From there, they can steal identities or forge digital signatures to
May 23, 2026 · via thalesgroup.com
The Department of Commerce has signed nine letters of intent (LOI) to provide more than $2 billion in CHIPS and Science Act funding to companies aimed at accelerating quantum technologies. Companies that signed LOIs include Atom Computing, Diraq, D-Wave, GlobalFoundries, IBM, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, and Rigetti. That list includes two domestic quantum foundry companies and seven quantum computing companies, according to Commerce. The CHIPS and Science Act was approved by Congress in 2022 and made up to $52 billion of funding available to incentivize semiconductor makers to establish new manufacturing operations in the United States. The Commerce Department said the new quantum incentives are aimed at cementing U.S. leadership in a technology seen as critical to national security, advanced manufacturing, drug discovery, finance, and energy. Officials said building a strong domestic quantum ecosystem is key to maintaining America’s long-term technological and strategic edge. GlobalFoundries will receive $375 million to establish a domestic quantum foundry for leading architectures and multiple modalities used in large-scale quantum computers, and IBM will receive $1 billion to build a quantum foundry subsidiary for quantum-grade superconducting wafers. Diraq will be awarded $38 million, and the remaining six companies will each receive $100 million. “The CHIPS R&D Office is taking a portfolio approach to strengthen and accelerate U.S. leadership across multiple quantum modalities at once, while focusing each award on discrete technological problems of genuine consequence,” Bill Frauenhofer, executive director of semiconductor investment and innovation at the Commerce Department, said in a statement. “We will be providing incentives to build domestic quantum capacity, solve the hardest engineering challenges, enable multi-year acceleration of technology roadmaps, and drive continued U.S. quantum leadership,” Frauenhofer continued. According to Commerce, the CHIPS incentives will help address multiple quantum modalities, such as neutral atom, silicon-spin, superconducting, photonic, and trapped ion, while accelerating research
May 23, 2026 · via meritalk.com
When a singer belts out a tune while a guitar player strums along, sound waves travel through the air, driving collective oscillations of the molecules within. Meanwhile, at the quantum level, something similar is going on. Atoms inside materials, everything from our bodies to metals and more, naturally jiggle around, creating tiny vibrational waves that ripple across the material. These vibrations are known as phonons: the quantum version of sound waves. Now, physicists at Caltech and Stanford University have developed devices called nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) that allow phonons to exhibit their quantum behavior purely through the intrinsic properties of the material that makes up the device. Previously, it was not possible to observe such behavior without the help of an external quantum device, such as a superconducting qubit. This means that through this newly discovered mechanism a solitary NEMS device, can, for example, serve as a greatly simplified and very compact quantum sensor or qubit. More specifically, the goal of the work is to make the vibrations of the NEMS nonlinear. If you imagine the energy levels in a nonlinear system as steps in a ladder, it is as if the ladder steps are not evenly spaced. "You don't want linear systems for quantum applications, because then you can't tell what state the system is in—all the step changes that the system can make look the same," says Mert Yuksel (PhD '26), a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and co-lead author of the new study. "So, having nonlinearity is the goal, and now we can achieve this in the NEMS intrinsically." The new work, part of an emerging field called quantum acoustics, marks a next step toward creating quantum-sensing devices that use single phonons to precisely detect extremely small changes in materials. The findings, reported in Nature Physics, have applications in quantum
May 22, 2026 · via caltech.edu
The introduction of quantum-secure cryptography in iMessage marked the start of a significant security transition to protect Apple users from threats posed by future quantum computers. Deploying this new generation of algorithms at scale across all Apple platforms requires high assurance, so we developed rigorous new formal verification methods to prove the mathematical correctness of our implementation. With this weekâs release of corecrypto, weâre publishing our implementations of quantum-secure ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms â along with the mathematical proofs we built to assure they are faithful to the FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 specifications â for independent evaluation by experts. And to further advance the state of the art for assuring critical software, we're also publishing the formal verification libraries and tools that we created to achieve the strongest known correctness results for any widely-deployed production implementation of the relevant algorithms. In 2024, we added post-quantum encryption to corecrypto, the foundational cryptographic library in Apple operating systems. To address the well-documented threat from future quantum computers, weâve been working to first develop and deploy strong, quantum-secure cryptography in areas where itâs likely to have the greatest benefit: applications involving encrypted communications and other sensitive information, including iMessage, VPN, and TLS networking. In addition, quantum-secure APIs included with our Apple CryptoKit release last fall enable developers to adopt quantum-secure encryption and authentication in their own apps. corecrypto is used continuously in our products, providing encryption and decryption, hashing, random number generation, and digital signatures on over 2.5 billion active devices. A critical bug in corecrypto has the potential to compromise the security and reliability of every app and feature that depends on it, so we are conservative when adding new code to the library and make exceptional efforts to be comprehensive in our testing. We include new cryptographic algorithms in corecrypto
May 22, 2026 · via security.apple.com
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May 22, 2026 · via youtube.com
France to invest €1.5 billion in quantum computing, advanced microchips
This comes a day after the US unveiled plans to take US$2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing companies
“I’ll say it out loud. We have the means to be the winners of this race,” Macron said while announcing the funding.
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled plans to take US$2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing companies to secure US leadership in the technology that is set to become the next frontier after AI.
Technological breakthroughs have deepened investor interest in quantum computing’s potential to speed up tasks from drug discovery to financial modelling and cryptography.
A “massive” increase in investment has been driven by the realisation of the growing economic importance of computing infrastructure, Theau Peronnin, CEO of Paris-headquartered quantum computing firm Alice & Bob, told Reuters.
May 22, 2026 · via scmp.com
Pedro Ramos of the PQI, Portuguese Quantum Institute, and colleagues at Quantum Green Co, Physics of Information and Quantum Technologies Group, fLaPMET – Laboratory of Physics for Materials and Emerging Technologies, have identified a potential energetic advantage in quantum computation using superconducting cat qubits. The group analysed the energy consumption of the Semiclassical Quantum Fourier Transform, incorporating quantum error correction mechanisms to provide realistic energy estimations. Their findings reveal how energy usage scales with qubit number and identify key parameters influencing overall consumption. This led to the development of an optimisation method for minimising energy while preserving qubit fidelity. The study demonstrates a quantum energetic advantage, with lower energy consumption, may be achievable for systems exceeding 26 qubits even before a computational advantage is realised, and this benefit persists with realistic cryogenic system constraints. Energetic advantage established for cat qubit systems beyond twenty-six qubits Cat qubit systems now consume less energy than classical systems at above 26 qubits, establishing a potential energetic advantage. Previously, demonstrating energetic benefits required a computational speedup. This reveals potential savings even without faster processing. This 26-qubit threshold is important as it marks the point where quantum systems may become more sustainable than their classical counterparts, a key step for scaling the technology. The implications of this finding are substantial, as the energy demands of quantum computation have long been a significant barrier to widespread adoption. Classical computers, while mature and readily available, are facing increasing energetic limitations as computational demands grow, prompting exploration of alternative paradigms like quantum computing. However, the substantial power requirements of maintaining the delicate quantum states necessary for computation have presented a considerable challenge. The analysis focused on the Semiclassical Quantum Fourier Transform, a key operation in many quantum algorithms, performed on superconducting qubits utilising ‘cat’ states, representing information akin to
May 22, 2026 · via quantumzeitgeist.com
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May 22, 2026 · via youtube.com
Rose-Hulman Launches New Quantum Science, Computing & Engineering (QSCE) Certification Rose-Hulman has launched a new Quantum Science, Computing & Engineering (QSCE) certificate that allows students from STEM disciplines to become better acquainted with the fundamentals of QSCE and its potential to usher in the next information revolution. In an era that is often described as a “transistor moment,” the QSCE certification can help students be part of an up-and-coming enterprise that may define how computation and information processing looks for decades to come. Quantum mechanics has the capability to transform the enterprise of information processing and computation. But the science — and equally important, the engineering — that is needed to realize the potential is just now catching up. This brings up the need for quantum-proficient scientists and engineers. “Many students within the Department of Physics, Optical Engineering, and NanoEngineering are interested in topics related to quantum information, science, computing, and engineering,” said Maarij Syed, PhD, professor of Physics, Optical Engineering, and NanoEngineering. “These are individuals who do not have to be steeped into quantum mechanics research but need to understand the basic ideas at work. The certification will help them become better acquainted with those emerging areas and be part of that future workforce.” The QSCE certification will officially be offered to students beginning in fall 2026. The certificate consists of three required core courses: Foundations of Modern Physics, Quantum Computing & Engineering, and Fundamentals of QISE. Students also take an additional two electives from an evolving list of science and engineering courses for a total of 20 credit hours. The guiding idea behind the curriculum is to make it attainable for students of diverse backgrounds to join the certificate program. While offering a QSCE certification is not necessarily unique, Rose is offering the certification at the undergraduate level
May 22, 2026 · via rose-hulman.edu
Satoshi’s 1.1 million bitcoin and millions more can be saved from quantum attack, says expert Researchers at the privacy-centric blockchain startup say their multi-layer quantum defense will feature a soft fork to freeze and protect dormant BTC. What to know: - AmericanFortress has unveiled a patent-pending post-quantum signature scheme that aims to protect existing crypto assets, including dormant wallets, from future quantum attacks without mass fund migrations. - The proposed protocol would use a backward-compatible soft fork and zero-knowledge proofs to freeze and secure vulnerable pre-BIP32 bitcoin addresses, such as Satoshi-era wallets, while allowing governance to later decide whether to move, burn or redistribute the funds. - Backed by an $8 million seed round, AmericanFortress says its approach offers quantum protection for major chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Tron with negligible performance impact and simple node and wallet software updates. AmericanFortress researchers introduced a patent-pending post-quantum signature scheme that could secure the global crypto ecosystem against future quantum attacks without requiring mass fund migrations. According to the company, the breakthrough means even Satoshi Nakamoto's huge 1.1 million bitcoin stash, alongside nearly 5 million BTC in dormant accounts, can be saved, with a combined value of about $400 billion. In an interview with CoinDesk, Michal Pospieszalski, CEO of AmericanFortress, explained that inactive and dormant wallets do not have to remain vulnerable to unscrupulous hackers, who could sweep up the loot and dump it onto the market with incalculable consequences. However, Pospieszalski said a major point of confusion is the older bitcoin. Because Satoshi-era wallets are “Pre-BIP32” addresses with no seed phrase derivation and therefore cannot automatically be upgraded like the newer created wallets. Instead, the AmericanFortress’ protocol would execute a defensive freeze via a backward-compatible soft fork. “Our quantum-resistant protocol would automatically freeze and protect those funds until governance decides
May 22, 2026 · via coindesk.com
Crypto industry braces for quantum computing threat
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May 22, 2026 · via ft.com
The Trump administration plans to invest in two quantum computing start-ups, PsiQuantum and Diraq, which are both backed by the Australian government, as part of a $US2 billion ($2.8 billion) bet on nine quantum computing firms.
PsiQuantum is one of five other companies that will each receive $US100 million from the US Department of Commerce in exchange for equity stakes in the company. The Silicon Valley quantum computer firm was last valued at more than $10 billion and also attracted buy-in from Nvidia.
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May 22, 2026 · via afr.com
May 21, 2026 12:59 PM CDT
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May 21, 2026 · via chicagobusiness.com
Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities, on Thursday described quantum computing (QTUM) as a âderivative playâ on the ongoing AI (AIQ) revolution, calling it the technology that will âpush forward on AIâ to the next level.
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May 21, 2026 · via seekingalpha.com
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May 21, 2026 · via timesunion.com