Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Interesting slides: Peter Gutmann - Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks
Since quantum computers are far outside my expertise, I didn't realize how far-fetched it currently is to factor large numbers with quantum computers. I already knew it's not near-future stuff for practical attacks on e.g. real-world RSA keys, but I didn't know it's still that theoretical. (Although of course I lack the knowledge to assess whether that presentation is correct in its claims.)
But also, while reading it, I kept thinking how many of the broader points it makes also apply to the AI hype... (for example, the unfounded belief that game-changing breakthroughs will happen soon).
Comparing quantum computing to time machines or faster-than-light travel is unfair. In order for the latter to exist, our understanding of physics would have to be wrong in a major way. Quantum computing presumes that our understanding of physics is correct. Making it work is "only" an engineering problem, in the sense that Newton's laws say that a rocket can reach the Moon, so the Apollo program was "only" a engineering project. But breaking any ciphers with it is a long way off.
heh yup. I think the most recent one (somewhere in the last year) was something like 12-bit rsa? stupendously far off from being a meaningful thing
I’ll readily admit to being a cryptography mutt and a qc know-barely-anything, and even from my limited understanding the assessment of where people are at (with how many qubits they’ve managed to achieve in practical systems) everything is hilariously woefully far off ito attacks
that doesn’t entirely invalidate pqc and such (since the notion there is not merely defending against today/soon but also a significant timeline)
one thing I am curious about (and which you might’ve seen or be able to talk about, blake): is there any kind of known correlation between qubits and viable attacks? I realize part of this quite strongly depends on the attack method as well, but off the cuff I have a guess (“intuition” is probably the wrong word) that it probably scales some weird way (as opposed to linear/log/exp)