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Glad Google is doing this because next month could be a real test when China launches its Quantum Satellite.


Today’s encryption is an arms race as digital security experts try to hold off hackers’ attempts to break open user data. But there’s a new tech on the horizon that even the NSA recognizes as crucial to protect against: quantum computing, which is expected to dramatically speed up attempts to crack some commonly-used cryptographic schemes. To get ahead of the game, Google is testing new digital security setups on single-digit populations of Chrome users.

Quantum computing is such a potential threat because it can do many more simultaneous calculations than current computers. Modern binary bits can only be in two states when electric current is run through them: 0 or 1. But the ambiguous nature of the quantum state means its elemental units (known as “qubits”) could be in either state at a time, so two could potentially be in four orientations at one time: 00, 01, 10 or 11. That ambiguity is exponential, so three qubits could be in eight at a time, and so on.

Security experts aren’t just concerned that quantum computers’ higher speed means faster rates of cryptography-cracking: They’re worried that future hacking methods could come back to today’s encrypted data and pry it open. But that’s in the future: as Wired points out, crypto experts say you would need a quantum computer with hundreds of thousands of qubits, and IBM’s only has five.

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Great that they didn’t have to use a super computer to do their prescribed, lab controlled experiments. However, to limit QC to a super computer and experimental computations only is a big mistake; I cannot stress this enough. QC is a new digital infrastructure that changes our communications, cyber security, and will eventually (in the years to come) provide consumers/ businesses/ and governments with the performance they will need for AI, Biocomputing, and Singularity.


A group of physicists from the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Lomonosov Moscow State University, has learned to use personal computer for calculations of complex equations of quantum mechanics, usually solved with help of supercomputers. This PC does the job much faster. An article about the results of the work has been published in the journal Computer Physics Communications.

Senior researchers Vladimir Pomerantcev and Olga Rubtsova, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Kukulin (SINP MSU) were able to use on an ordinary desktop PC with GPU to solve complicated integral equations of quantum mechanics — previously solved only with the powerful, expensive supercomputers. According to Vladimir Kukulin, personal computer does the job much faster: in 15 minutes it is doing the work requiring normally 2–3 days of the supercomputer time.

The equations in question were formulated in the 60s by the Russian mathematician Ludwig Faddeev. The equations describe the scattering of a few quantum particles, i.e., represent a quantum mechanical analog of the Newtonian theory of the three body systems. As the result, the whole field of quantum mechanics called “physics of few-body systems” appeared soon after this.

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Looks to be quite fascinating…

But is anyone else annoyed by the never ending use of the word “cyber”?

*sigh*.


Tapping into the geopolitics of hacking and surveillance, Ben Makuch travels the world to meet with hackers, government officials, and dissidents to investigate the ecosystem of cyberwarfare.

CYBERWAR premieres Tuesday, July 5th, at 10:30 P EST on VICELAND.

The things you learn on the DarkWeb. Wonder what will happen when more and more countries and folks onboard to the Quantum Internet, etc. Could we see one last massive apocalyptic raid on accounts, etc.?


X5 simplifies the process of stealing details from contactless debit cards, cloning fake debit cards.

A criminal group going under the name of The CC Buddies is selling a hi-tech device on the Dark Web that’s capable of copying details from contactless debit cards if held as close as eight centimeters away from a victim’s card.

CC Buddies claim that their device, named Contactless Infusion X5, can copy up to 15 bank cards per second, something that may come in hand if a crook is going through a crowd at a concert or through a crowded subway cart.

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Boy; wait until next month with China’s Quantum Launch.


By Munish Sharma.

Cyber has been one of the key discussion items during both Prime Minister Modi’s just concluded visit to the United States and President Xi Jinping’s visit to the US some nine months back. After Xi’s visit, China and the US signed a Cyber Agreement in October 2015. India and the US will ink a cyber agreement in the next sixty days. Notwithstanding these similarities, the intent of and expectations from these two agreements are fundamentally different; the former is an attempt to manage insecurity and the latter is a quest for security. An analysis of the joint statements issued at the end of the Modi and Xi visits to the US highlights the contrasting differences in India and China’s bilateral ties with the United States in the cyber realm.

China : US – Cyber and State Visit

Xi Jinping’s state visit to the US took place in the shadow of a massive cyber-attack on the Office of Personnel Management (December 2014), which compromised the fingerprint records of 5.6 million people and Social Security numbers and addresses of around 21 million former and current government employees. 1 The US has been accusing China of theft of intellectual property targeted against its defence industries, private sector and key governmental functions; amounting to economic espionage. Accusations in this regard go back to 2004, when a series of coordinated attacks – dubbed as Titan Rain – targeted the computer networks of Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA. Cyber espionage featured in every high-level talk and security report.

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