Technology

Tor Project, the group behind the anonymous Tor browser, hasreleasedan alpha version of its own anonymous browser for Android.

Following this release, Orfox, the longstanding Tor Project -approved browsing app for Android, said it will be sunset by 2019. To run both apps, users will need to also download the Tor Project proxy app,Orbot.

Tor Projectanonymous browser uses a system of decentralized relays that bounce a userdata to anonymize internet activity. This makes it almost impossible for ads, location trackers and even government surveillance to follow your tracks across the web. While Tor is often associated with illegal drug or weapons sales on the dark web, the browser is also a haven for political dissidents, journalists and just browsers who prefer to maintain their anonymity.

This release comes several days after Tor Project rolled out Tor Browser 8.0, based on Firefox2017 Quantum browser structure. The major updates include a new user landing and on-boarding page, increased language support and improved bridging methods to enable users to access the browser in countries where Tor is banned — like Turkey.

While the service is regarded as the current gold standard of anonymous browsing, there are still vulnerabilities. Federal investigators can gain access and identify users through security flaws in the browser itself. It remains to be seen how secure Firefox Quantum will be for Tor 8.0, but users would be wise to follow Torguidelines on further protecting their anonymity, just in case.

&Tis the season for hardware events. First Apple, then Google and now Microsoft all have big announcements on tap for the next month or so. Details are light on this one. Same can be said for the invite, which is just a Microsoft logo and the words &a moment of your time.&

The event will most likely be focused on Surface hardware. The Surface Go was just announced a couple of weeks back, so we can tick that one off the list. A refresh to some of the existing products certainly seems plausible — the Surface Pro and Studio, among others, could certainly use them.

I wouldn&t be surprised to see some new additions to the line, either. Given that the companybutting up against Apple and Google events, itgoing to have to put on a big show to cut through noise here. Though the long rumored Surface Phone (including that dual-screen device render thatbeen floating around) is most likely not in the cards this time out.

As for what &a moment of your time& is hinting at, your guess is as good as ours. A Surface Watch Sure, why not The Fall event kicks off at 4PM ET on October 2 in New York City. We&ll be there with Surface Bells on.

Rigetti, a quantum computing startup that is challenging the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Google in this nascent space, today at our TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 event announced the launch of its new hybrid quantum computing platform.

While Rigetti already offered API access to its quantum computing platform, this new service, dubbed Quantum Cloud Services (QCS), offers a combination of a cloud-based classical computer, its Forest development platform and access to Rigettiquantum backends. Thanks to this, developers will be able to write and test their algorithms significantly faster than with the companyprevious approach.

In addition to the new platform, which is now in private testing, Rigetti also announced a $1 million prize for the first team that manages to show quantum advantage on this hybrid platform. Quantum advantage, at least according to Rigettidefinition, is the milestone where a quantum system will be able to solve a real problem that is beyond the reach of classical computers. The company plans to announce more details around this prize at the end of October.

As Rigetti founder and CEO Chad Rigetti told me, the reason the hybrid approach is faster is simply because the two systems are closely integrated — and you will likely always need a classical computer in parallel with a quantum computer for solving virtually any problem. And the company expects that this hybrid approach — and likely the 128-qubit machine that Rigetti plans to launch next year — will allow for running an algorithm that demonstrates quantum advantage. The current API Rigetti makes available to developers features 8-qubit and 19-qubit machines. Those machines are nowhere near powerful enough to show quantum advantage, but they do give developers the ability to start experimenting with using quantum computers.

On the old platform, Rigetti also noted, the kind of loops you need to run to use the quantum machine for machine learning, for example, had a latency on the order of a second or more. &A lot of these algorithms require thousands and tens of thousands of iterations,& Rigetti said. &And now we have reduced this down to the order of milliseconds.&

Rigetti also today announced that it is partnering with a number of leading quantum computing startups (the kind that work on the software, not the hardware side of this ecosystem). These startups, including Entropica Labs, Horizon Quantum Computing, OTI Lumionics, ProteinQure, QC Ware and Riverlane Research, will build and distribute the applications through the Rigetti QCS platform.