audiovisual (urls)

Sean Lynch seanl at literati.org
Tue Dec 3 22:14:41 PST 2013


On Tue, Dec 03 2013, Jim Bell wrote:

> Okay, thank you for clarifying this matter.  I merely Google-searched
> for  'EDFA quantum entanglement' and found and cited this paper, and
> that only because it referred to the problem of trying to amplify
> quantum signals through an EDFA. 

No problem. Not having read the actual paper, I'm not even sure what
they meant by "noise" preventing amplification of quantum signals in an
EDFA. Quantum states cannot be copied, which seems like a more
fundamental problem, but perhaps they are talking about the potential
for using an EDFA just to create a large number of entangled particles.

> Myself, I am hoping that longer-key public-key cryptosystems will
> remain unsolved by quantum techniques, at least as long as it takes
> to get rid of governments.  After that, it probably won't matter.  As
> of now, it looks like things will go the way I'd like.

I'm fairly optimistic for a couple of different reasons. First of all,
progress on quantum computers has been very slow and the experts in the
field who have spoken up believe it's unlikely the NSA has a major
breakthrough on this front. Second, I'm skeptical that quantum computers
can even be made to work at all. While D-Wave and others have built
systems that they *believe* are quantum computers and shown some
evidence that they behave as one would expect for such devices, nothing
has yet been demonstrated that could not easily been achieved with a
classical computer, though much of this is due to the small scale of the
devices.

Even if quantum computers can be made to work, one can hope that by then
we'll either have quantum cryptography infrastructure in place (though
the need for physical infrastructure scares me here - maybe guerrilla
wireless quantum crypto?) or have widespread access to practical
quantum-proof public-key crypto. Maybe either the NTRU patent will have
expired or we'll have found alternative cryptosystems that do not
infringe, ala the Lucas sequence alternative to RSA. Of course, the
patent is only a problem in the US and its satellite states anyway.

-- 
Sean Richard Lynch <seanl at literati.org>
http://www.literati.org/~seanl/
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