That's referring to attacking the factoring problem, which is one method of attacking RSA, and as I said is known to be faster than exponential, but it felt like the comment to which I was replying was talking about something other than just faster factoring.
I know there are other attacks on RSA, I was interested to know if the poster to whom I was replying knew of any others (other than factoring, which is kinda obvious). After all, I said:
> I know that factoring (which attacks RSA) is sub-exponential, ...
oss-security gets relatively little use?
You must know another oss-security. The one I'm subscribed to is very much alive and an important source of information for me.
It gets little use in the sense that only a small fraction of vulnerabilities are reported there, and there are very few non-advisory discussions (often by the same 2-3 people).
It does get use in the sense that every now and then, some vendor sends 50 emails that could've been one (most recently, some Apache Qpid thing). But I wouldn't call that part valuable.
There are reasons browsers do things the way they do.
Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.
Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.
My best guess would be some kind of netapp product, as we saw some self-signed certs on hosts that identified as netapp. But netapp didn't answer, and we got either no or no useful feedback from any of the certificate owners. So we ended up being unable to figure that out.
I'll probably share a list in some way soon and will try to ask the wider cryptographic and TLS community if anyone can figure it out.
Hanno - we may have communicated before some years ago, but am more than happy to offer any help I can (if some of our customers are/were affected, happy to reach out and see if they can give you more answers as to which products).
nick (at) sectigo (dot) com
My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream.
Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing.
As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are faster at some very specific problems like breaking cryptography (I doubt that there's a mass market for decrypting the old WIFI traffic you stored from your neighbor, and, these days, most internet traffic is already pq safe) and simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day).
In all likelihood, quantum computers will be specialized devices used, e.g., by scientists. You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.
> simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day)
Maybe this will be used for video games at some point?
Saying that this will never happen feels a bit like what people were saying about computers when they were filling rooms and cost a fortune, and now everyone has a few of them and finds a lot of uses for them.
Quantum computers help simulate the unintuitive parts of physics, not those that feel natural to humanst and therefore make sense to include in a game.
It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer. If you wanted to model it using quantum physics instead (where quantum computers would theoretically have an advantage) said computer would need so many qubits that it would be much larger than the world it's supposed to simulate, while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the player. You'd be better off using analog computing by putting a telepresence robot inside a real-world game arena.
> It's possible to simulate the classical physics of fairly large game worlds using fairly small classical computer.
Not really, almost everything is faked and not really a physics sim. Imagine a world like GTA but every material has realistic deformation and destruction.
I’m not saying quantum computers would be able to do that, but it’s not like current video games are at a point where more compute wouldn’t improve them.
> while the additional realism would be essentially imperceptible to the player
Personally for me this is the relevant part.
I can ofc imagine some niche games like Kerbal Space Program with complete realism, but I'm not convinced it makes it more enjoyable to play. Would be interesting to see for sure.
Anyway, the article is about Microslop, a mostly-sw company taking about hw quantum computers. What serious discussion is there? Someone just wanted to sell their shares.
Any kind of quantum workload would live in servers since their capabilities will likely never be latency sensitive. I think what is more interesting is finding a way to utilize the fact that quantum information is capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, obviously observation of the data is bound the same limitations as we have today, but we could scale bandwidth by encoding data and "teleporting" it to the destination greatly increasing throughput, you can think of it as infinite compression. Even more interesting would be to genuinely understand why our universe is able to bind particles like that though since right we know it happens and we can observe it, but we don't really know why or even if it travels faster than the speed of light, but rather we are simply surfacing a derandomized value. This is pretty hard to explain, but if we follow the many-worlds theory we're simply observing an artifact that if we observe value B in the future, we are simply from a universe that had the value B to begin with which means the information never needed to travel at light speed, it was always there.
I think we will find quantum going mainstream in places we least expect, mostly based around derandomization and amplification of data throughput rather than any kind of compute.
Wasn't the entire conflict behind entanglement that it appeared to have the capability to violate this princible with the only two explanations being: quantum state travels faster than the speed of light or we're in a many-worlds universe where state propagates backwards which means the information was there from the very beginning?
The key word here is "information". No known quantum effect results in information being transferred faster than the speed of light (which might be more correctly known these days as a the speed limit of information). Entanglement, even at great distance, does not violate this principle as that cannot be effectively used to transfer information.
The historical debate around Bell's Theorem and Einstein's "spooky action" often leads to this exact confusion, but quantum mechanics has an ironclad mathematical guardrail against this: the No-Communication Theorem.
Entanglement cannot be used to transmit messages, amplify bandwidth, or achieve "infinite compression" for a few foundational reasons:
1) The Classical Bottleneck: In quantum teleportation, you aren't actually moving information through space faster than light. To reconstruct the state of a teleported qubit at the destination, the sender must transmit two classical bits of data over a standard, traditional channel (limited by the speed of light, c).
2) The Randomness Vector: Without those two classical bits, the receiver's particle looks like completely randomized entropy (a maximally mixed state). You could spin your entangled particle right now, and the person on Mars would see their particle change state instantly—but to them, it just looks like a random coin toss. They cannot know what you chose to measure or what your result was until your classical radio signal arrives to break the encryption.
3) Holevo's Bound: From an information theory perspective, Holevo's theorem proves you cannot extract more than one bit of classical information from a single qubit. While superdense coding lets you pre-share entanglement to send two classical bits using one physical qubit, it still requires physically moving that qubit through space at or below the speed of light.
Whether you favor Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, or Pilot Wave theory, the physical reality across all interpretations remains identical: local causality is never violated. Entanglement shows us that nature is non-local, but it completely forbids us from weaponizing that non-locality to send a signal faster than c.
That's the bit I was thinking about the most: "pre-share entanglement to send two classical bits using one physical qubit" I did mention that we cannot achieve data transfer faster than the speed of light, but with the use of "teleportation" we can increase bandwidth that still holds true doesn't it?
The only source seems to be a fringe right-wing news webpage (Apollo News) citing from an internal paper (which, it sounds to me, is just a vague proposal from a media oversight body). I have not seen any reports in major news publications, and would assume there's a lot of context missing in this reporting.
Historic bit: in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a bit of a trend - and quite some tension - of demoscene parties getting taken over by LAN parties. I believe the Gathering used to be a demoscene party, but completely transformed into a gaming LAN party.
There were also those that tried to be both (I believe Assembly is doing both to this day) or those that kept the gaming out (Mekka/Symposium, which no longer exists, but there's been a followup party called Breakpoint, and later another followup called Revision that still exists).
The Gathering used to be a demoscene event! Even hosted the scene.org awards in 2011. Looking at pouet.net, quite a lot of famous demos were released there, such as:
Today, the demoscene still lives in Norway albeit arguably on life support. Those that are still interested usually go to "proper demoparties". Solskogen, the old demoparty, had its last event during COVID. Black Valley is a replacement and it seems to be doing well. I was at Solskogen '17 and it was a great collection of hacker-minded people. There was also plenty of alcohol, I can understand why demosceners - an aging population, would prefer their own party to the alcohol-free The Gathering.
The Gathering currently has a mix of creative and e-sport events. I feel like the end of creative has loomed over our heads for 10 years, at least we definitely felt like a minority when I was crew back in the first half of the 2010s. But it still lives, and people still participate in the competitions!
As far as cloud service servers are concerned, I don't think ARM CPUs have any meaningful marketshare, right?
You could start running things on ARM, but, almost certainly, that comes with a lot of extra friction. (Not saying that isn't a bad idea, it'd probably improve the ecosystem as a whole and flush out architecture-specific assumptions in server software. But it's not someting trivial to do.)
AWS runs a lot of ARM server and they are pushed heavily since they are cheaper and faster. And with Apple running ARM it is just easier to fully transition now.
If the processor is mostly idle or running minimally optimized software, which is most software, then ARM offers better performance per watt. If the processor is running highly optimized code at max throughput all the time then x86 offers better performance per watt.
This is an intrinsic tradeoff. To make low-utilization workloads more power efficient you have to make high-utilization workloads less power efficient and vice versa. ARM and x86 differentiate themselves by taking opposite ends of that tradeoff spectrum.
More than 50 % of new CPU capacity on AWS is arm. Most of their own stuff uses it, nitro co processors are also arm. Anyone caring about cost of AWS has or is transitioning.
Arm has been growing fast for years, recent stories claim ARM is at 50% for hyperscalers (google, amazon and microsoft are making their own designs) and 25% for general servers according to stories from this year, and the share is growing fast.
x86/64 is looking more and more like the next Alpha or MIPS in many ways.
Making hydrogen from seawater is not an actual problem that needs solving.
The problem with hydrogen electrolysis is its energy requirements to split water. The energy requirements for the desalination of water before that is a rounding error. It's not worth the hassle to develop electrolyzers that can deal with seawater.
Reference to a scientific paper is given: https://www.ams.org/notices/199612/pomerance.pdf
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