Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Comparing quantum computing to time machines or faster-than-light travel is unfair. In order for the latter to exist, our understanding of physics would have to be wrong in a major way. Quantum computing presumes that our understanding of physics is correct. Making it work is āonlyā an engineering problem, in the sense that Newtonās laws say that a rocket can reach the Moon, so the Apollo program was āonlyā a engineering project. But breaking any ciphers with it is a long way off.
I didnāt interpret the slides as an attack on quantum computing per se, but rather an attack on over-enthusiastic assertions of its near-future implications. If the likelihood of near-future QC breaking real-world cryptography is so extremely low, itās IMO okay to make a point by comparing it to things which are (probably) impossible. Itās an exaggeration of course, and as you point out the analogy isnāt correct in that way, but I still think it makes a good point.
What I find insightful about the comparison is that it puts the finger on a particular brain worm of the tech world: the unshakeable belief that every technical development will grow exponentially in its capabilities. So as soon as the most basic version of something is possible, it is believed that the most advanced forms of it will follow soon after. I think this belief was created because itās what actually happened with semiconductors, and of course the bold (in its day) prediction that was Mooreās law, and then later again, the growth of the internet.
And now this thinking is applied to everything all the time, including quantum computers (and, as I pointed to in my earlier post, AI), driven by hype, by FOMO, by the fear of āthis time I donāt want to be among those who didnāt recognize it earlyā. But there is no inherent reason why a development should necessarily follow such a trajectory. That doesnāt mean of course that itās impossible or wonāt get there eventually, just that it may take much more time.
So in that line of thought, I think itās ok to say āhey look everyone, we have very real actual problems in cryptography that need solving right now, and on the other hand hereās the actual state and development of QC which youāre all worrying about, but that stuff is so far away you might just as well worry about time machines, so please letās focus more on the actual problems of today.ā (thatās at least how I interpret the presentation).
heh yup. I think the most recent one (somewhere in the last year) was something like 12-bit rsa? stupendously far off from being a meaningful thing
Iāll readily admit to being a cryptography mutt and a qc know-barely-anything, and even from my limited understanding the assessment of where people are at (with how many qubits theyāve managed to achieve in practical systems) everything is hilariously woefully far off ito attacks
that doesnāt entirely invalidate pqc and such (since the notion there is not merely defending against today/soon but also a significant timeline)
one thing I am curious about (and which you mightāve seen or be able to talk about, blake): is there any kind of known correlation between qubits and viable attacks? I realize part of this quite strongly depends on the attack method as well, but off the cuff I have a guess (āintuitionā is probably the wrong word) that it probably scales some weird way (as opposed to linear/log/exp)