Viss4d ago

RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/116806161449420890

everyone freaking out about post-quantum cryptography needs to remember that there are possibly a dozen quantum computers in the entire world, and they are absolutely nowhere near being ready for general purpose computing. the cooling needs alone are immense.

and on top of that, now we got microsoft lying about their setup and its outputs

Show threadTony “Abolish ICE” Arcieri🌹🦀4d ago
@Viss @carnage4life on the one hand there have been some interesting developments in quantum error correction recently, as well as improvements in quantum resource estimates for cryptanalysis, on the other hand it remains to be seen if quantum computers can ever be scaled to be large enough break public key cryptography at all, and the largest number factored on an actual quantum computer using an almost comically minified version of the polynomial time Shor’s algorithm is… 21
Show threadScott Francis

@bascule @Viss @carnage4life also useful to note that there are about 8 hardware modalities for quantum, and only a few are superconducting. The whole field is very much like mainframes in the 40s and 50s: bespoke machines designed for a particular problem set, with programming interfaces unique to that machine and little to no ability to connect to the outside world.

However: telling somebody they should make a 3-5 year change when the threat materializes, on data with a 15-20 year shelf life, is why people need to act now (Mosca's inequality). By the time everybody agrees this is a present danger, there will be no way to retroactively mitigate that risk exposure.

Jun 25 at 12:04amWeb