Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Creator Playbook Trending Now Mashable Selects Look Up Getting Technical with Mashable Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Say More Versus In My Bag Mashable @Home All Series Tabitha Britt is an award-winning freelance journalist, editor, and SEO/AEO strategist. Aside from reviewing dating apps and sex toys for Mashable, Tabitha is also the founding editor-in-chief of DO YOU ENDO -- a digital magazine by individuals with endometriosis, for individuals with endometriosis. She has a Master's degree in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School for Social Research and is a grad of Sextech School. You can find more of her work in various online publications, including,, and . Editors and writers independently select products unless marked Sponsored or Promoted. Sponsored content is a paid ad, while content marked Promoted is chosen by Ziff Davis merchandising team and does not include input from individual authors. We may earn an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. These are the tech, tools, and products -- from laptops to e-readers, from earbuds to robovacs, and more -- that Mashable ranks best in class. Based on my extensive hands-on testing and expert input, I've picked the best sexting apps and online sites for different kinds of dirty talk, whether you're messaging a partner, meeting someone new, or paying a verified creator. Because sometimes the anticipation of a hookup is even hotter than the main event. In my experience, sexting is the ultimate form of digital foreplay . It can help long-distance partners feel closer, give long-term couples something to look forward to, and let singles explore sexual chemistry before meeting in person. Of course, everyone involved needs to be a consenting adult who's genuinely interested in taking the conversation to a steamier level. SEE ALSO: A beginner's guide to sexting A 2015 study of 870 heterosexual U.S. adults found that nearly 88 percent of participants had sexted. That wasn't a nationally representative estimate of all American adults, but it gives us an idea of how common sexting was among the people surveyed. You can use any mainstream dating app, like Tinder, Hinge, and even Hily, to find a potential sexting partner (though I think Pure is probably the best dating app for this). A match isn't permission to send something explicit, though.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Look Up Say More Safety Net Versus Creator Playbook In My Bag Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age Switch Off All Series Bypass content restrictions and protect your data with a high-quality VPN. Because incognito mode isn't going to cut it. Joseph Green is the Global Shopping Editor for Mashable. He covers VPNs, headphones, fitness gear, dating sites, streaming, and shopping events like Black Friday and Prime Day. Matt Ford is a freelance contributor to Mashable. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows could lock you out of your PC. Save your recovery key now! If you lose your BitLocker recovery key, Windows can lock you out of your files permanently. Here's how to check and save yours now.

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Gmail offers fully encrypted email. Your email isn't as private as you might assume--and you should look outside Google if you want to change that. Email that only your recipient can read--sounds like a great idea for sensitive messages, right? Especially if you could have that within Gmail.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across institutions without sharing raw data. However, gradient sharing still risks privacy leakage, such as gradient inversion attacks. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) can secure aggregation but often incurs prohibitive computational and communication overhead. Existing HE-based FL methods sit at two extremes: encrypting all gradients for full privacy at high cost, or partially encrypting gradients to save resources while exposing vulnerabilities. We present DictPFL, a practical framework that achieves full gradient protection with minimal overhead. DictPFL encrypts every transmitted gradient while keeping non-transmitted parameters local, preserving privacy without heavy computation. It introduces two key modules: Decomposefor-Partial-Encrypt (DePE), which decomposes model weights into a static dictionary and an updatable lookup table--only the latter is encrypted and aggregated, while the static dictionary remains local and requires neither sharing nor encryption; and Prune-for-Minimum-Encrypt (PrME), which applies encryption-aware pruning to minimize encrypted parameters via consistent, history-guided masks. Experiments show that DictPFL reduces communication cost by 402-748 and accelerates training by 28-65 compared to fully encrypted FL, while outperforming state-of-the-art selective encryption methods by 51-155 in overhead and 4-19 in speed. Remarkably, DictPFL's runtime is within 2 of plaintext FL, demonstrating--for the first time--that HE-based private federated learning is practical for real-world deployment.

The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs--but with added protection against surveillance. End-to-end encryption, in which data is encoded so that only users on either "end" of a conversation can decrypt their communications--and not the server that relays that information or any other interloper--has become the standard for modern privacy on the internet. But its very name suggests a kind of simple pipe with two openings. The metaphor, and often the encryption technology that has enabled that model, doesn't fit neatly onto the world of Slack, Discord, Google Docs, and the other multiuser, complex, collaborative software where people now live and work. So one group of cryptographers has built what they describe as the foundation for a new generation of end-to-end encrypted apps, with a new metaphor: Instead of a mere pipe, they want to create "spaces" where users can hold group conversations, host information on a server, collectively make changes to it, invite in new collaborators or kick them out, all while maintaining the same strong encryption protections that prevent the server or network eavesdroppers from accessing their data.

Quantum computers could cause a global security crisis that makes the once-feared millennium bug, or Y2K, look quaint. This infamous computer risk was averted through the persistent behind-the-scenes work of engineers across the world, but whether the new threat will be tackled similarly is an urgent yet unresolved question. Most digital communications and transactions are protected by cryptography based on mathematical problems that are unsolvable by conventional computers but are solvable by a sufficiently capable quantum computer. Researchers have understood this since the late 1990s, but the day when this capable-enough quantum computer comes online - or Q-Day - was thought to be very far in the future. Working quantum computers are now a reality, and recent leaps in how to use them are bringing Q-Day ever closer.