Whether it's while flirting with a secret crush or organising a surprise party, there are often times you'd like to keep certain messages private. WhatsApp already has a Chat Lock feature that lets you protect your more sensitive conversations with your phone passcode, facial recognition or fingerprint. However, the Meta-owned app is taking things up a notch, with the launch of new'Secret Codes'. As the name suggests, the feature lets you set unique passwords on conversations, ensuring they stay away from any prying eyes. 'Today we're launching secret code, an additional way to protect those chats and make them harder to find if someone has access to your phone or you share a phone with someone else,' WhatsApp said.

Don't get sucked into consuming news via Facebook; seek to understand issues from a variety of perspectives. Your cocktail party action will likely pick up as a result of you better understanding the other side's argument. Read Innumeracy in the quiet of your own home to understand the questions you should be asking. Be statistically promiscuous by casually reading about statistics in action. Watch a lecture or two of anything to do with data science.

Earlier this week security reporter Brian Krebs pointed out an odd glitch in Google Translate. It had to do with the service's treatment of "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text--the string of Latin words that people use to block out space for text on websites and in other designs before meaningful verbiage is added. For some reason, strings of "Lorem Ipsum" were coming back as "NATO." In his post, Krebs works through a few examples and posits a few explanations. Perhaps someone is gaming the translate system for fun, or to get around Chinese censorship laws.

When Hillary Clinton lost her history-making bid for the presidency last week, many parents had the painful task of sharing a hopeful message with their little girls in the face of devastating defeat. Only time can numb that grief, but a new book offers solace with a message that girls can be the heroes of their own stories. SEE ALSO: Trump's America: What women, immigrants and people of color want you to know Secret Code follows the adventures of young girl who loves coding and dislikes chores so much that she programs a robot to pick up after her. The robot, however, takes matters into his own hands and its creator must save the day. What makes the book, which is available online only, even better is the ability to customize the heroine to reflect a girl's appearance and race or ethnicity.

The art of solving the Mastermind puzzle was initiated by Donald Knuth and is already more than 30 years old; despite that, it still receives much attention in operational research and computer games journals, not to mention the nature-inspired stochastic algorithm literature. In this paper we try to suggest a strategy that will allow nature-inspired algorithms to obtain results as good as those based on exhaustive search strategies; in order to do that, we first review, compare and improve current approaches to solving the puzzle; then we test one of these strategies with an estimation of distribution algorithm. Finally, we try to find a strategy that falls short of being exhaustive, and is then amenable for inclusion in nature inspired algorithms (such as evolutionary or particle swarm algorithms). This paper proves that by the incorporation of local entropy into the fitness function of the evolutionary algorithm it becomes a better player than a random one, and gives a rule of thumb on how to incorporate the best heuristic strategies to evolutionary algorithms without incurring in an excessive computational cost.