WhatsApp has announced a new feature that it says will “protect your most intimate conversations”. Chat Lock will allow users of the messaging app to take a chat thread from their inbox and put it in a new folder that can only be accessed by a password or biometric information, such as a fingerprint. Meta, the company’s owner, on Monday, said this would keep users’ conversations behind “one more layer of security” and has already started rolling it out. The content of messages in notifications will also be automatically hidden, the tech behemoth said. In a press release, Meta said: “We believe this feature will be great for people who share their phones from time to time with a family member, or in moments where someone else is holding your phone at the exact moment an extra-special chat arrives. “You can lock a chat by tapping the name of a one-to-one or group and selecting the lock option. To reveal these chats, slowly pull down on your inbox and enter your password or biometric.” It comes after warnings from WhatsApp that it could face being banned in the UK under the government’s online safety bill. Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp parent company Meta, said in late March that the upcoming legislation could weaken the end-to-end encryption that secures messages on the service. He added that if the government told the company to weaken any security features it would resist, leading to the possibility it could be banned in the UK." width="500"> Just last month it signed an open letter with its competitors, including Signal, arguing that the bill poses “an unprecedented threat to the privacy, safety and security of every UK citizen”. The row is over end-to-end encryption, used by WhatsApp, which allows only the sender and recipient to access the contents of a message. However, police and law enforcement agencies argue this feature makes it harder to uncover serious wrongdoing, such as child sexual abuse, and want to weaken the feature. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, said in a statement on Facebook: “New locked chats in WhatsApp make your conversations more private. “They’re hidden in a password-protected folder and notifications won’t show sender or message content.” Read More Creepy WhatsApp update sparks fears users are being listened to through their phone Government faces years of strike action from nurses, warns RCN chief Creepy WhatsApp update sparks fears users are being listened to through their phone WhatsApp just fixed two of its most glaring quirks Scientist spends 74 days underwater and expects to lose an inch in height

Investors are showing a willingness to give beaten-down electric-vehicle stocks another chance, but they’re being more discerning this

China is emerging as a block on negotiations in the run-up to a meeting of Group of 20

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This year’s international gathering to tackle the climate crisis will for the first time have a major presence

The crash sites of unidentified flying objects (or UFOs) are often mysterious in themselves, but even more so when you reportedly find what is simply described as “tiny spheres” akin to “cosmic sperm” in the area in question. Well, that’s what journalist George Knapp found when he obtained documents – some classified – from the Russian military into UFOs, something the Soviet government at the time had batted aside based on the view it was nothing but “Western propaganda”. Referring to a discovery from biologist Yuri Simakov of small balls discovered from the soil of landing sites, Knapp told the Weaponised podcast: “The impressions they made of the soil were pretty dramatic and it doesn’t look like anything that we fly, and he shared that with us. “He gave us all that information and then he found these little orbs. These tiny little perfect spheres … they were opaque. “They were sort of reddish orangish colour and he called them ‘cosmic sperm’. He thought they were some kind of a biological mechanism – some kind of seeds – and he gave me half of the world’s known supply of cosmic sperm and I brought them back.” We can’t believe we had to write that, and you probably can’t believe you just read that, but here we are. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Though if you’re wondering where the not-safe-for-work (NSFW) spheres are now, it turns out he sent them to Dr Thomas Hartmann at the University of Nevada, who confirmed there was nothing biological about the ‘spheres’. Knapp never got the spheres back though, so they’re likely still over there somewhere, yet to be retrieved. We think that’s probably for the best though, George, if we’re being perfectly honest. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Microsoft’s quick reaction to OpenAI’s shake-up reframes the investment case for its already popular stock. Its footprint in artificial intelligence makes it seem undervalued.

When Indonesia agreed last year to clean up its energy system with an estimated $20 billion of help

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Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund said more companies are honing emissions targets in response to tighter reporting

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