On 12/6/18 12:55 PM, jim bell wrote:

Scientific American: Is the U.S. Lagging in the Quest for Quantum Computing?. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-u-s-lagging-in-the-quest-f...

I would find it hard to believe that the U.S. "lags" any other country in its quest for quantum computer technology, given that the NSA can make an ironclad case demanding blank checks for QC R&D: Whoever gets there first, preferably in secret, will make giant strides toward world domination. In addition to breaking PKI ciphers, QC would probably enable breakthroughs in modeling complex systems, reducing many physical problems presently requiring massively parallel, massively iterated digital computation to de facto analog computations yielding nearly instant answers. "World domination" through QC would not include the ability to read all of everyone's message traffic. To date I have not heard anything indicating that QC will break modern symmetric ciphers, but I have information from unpublished sources indicating that the U.S. (therefore probably others as well) still uses one time pads, and/or large single use symmetric ciphers keys, for its most sensitive military communications. Scaling the activities in question up to cover all sensitive State communications presents no technical challenges, only financial ones. Naturally, private individuals will be out in the cold except for a handful of crypto geeks talking among themselves.