In the hype surrounding Google taking receipt of a narrow but possibly threshold DWave machine Google’s head of searching for a general Q computer made the statement that in 10 years time he expects all computers to be Quantum AI Learning machines. The main tech guy that would have to carry this out was standing next to him and expressed that he begrudgingly accepted this. We have to assume this means the NSA could already have this stuff and be a decade ahead since one of its main objectives seems to be cracking other people’s crypto.
David Irvine has in the past mentioned that SAFE can be retrofitted or adjusted but the comments were a while back. And I think else where in the forum people opined that even without retrofit or specific changes SAFE would still slow them down by a good measure. And of course we know it doesn’t seem that fully secure hardware is available and a good measure of common sense is necessary to have reliability. Remember the relatively recent warnings of Assange essentially: don’t use a computer to communicate.
But there are so many people like Assange that want to put an instant stop the lies and false flags of puppets and politicians. So many people that want to shut down their secrecy nonsense and drag their operations out in to the light. So where are we? What would it take once SAFE is launched to make sure the NSA has wasted a lot of time and money?
I think there’s time plenty to think about the proper schemes against Q machines because first the network has to launch, then it has to get popular and for ideal security it should get so popular we even won’t connect with our internet provider anymore.
We should really live inside the mesh and connect from p2p… Our computer should be secured from physical attacks and don’t have any non-safe connections.
Otherwise the easiest way is to attack the user through other ways much easier for them then cracking pub/piv keypairs and combining the stuff etc.
I agree with that analysis. But I think there are some pretty sophisticated users out there now in the position to dump info that the public needs and given that we might have narrow time windows to respond as tech continues to heat up and fiefdoms are challenged it would be great if SAFE could help them as soon as possible. There is good old fashioned stuff like paper and text its just getting it to a place where stuff can be widely disseminated and the messenger life to fight another day. Its frustrating for instance that Snowden released a bunch of stuff but let the media vet it- even if the media was Greenwald. Snowed thinks there are acceptable state secrets. A lot of people think state secrets amount to crime or need to be come recognized as crime as soon as possible and one way to do that is to continue to build the case against them with exponentially more evidence.
Safe use the Nacl Cryptography library. According this paper from D. J. Bernstein
To summarize, all of these cryptographic choices are quite conservative. We do not expect any of them to be broken until someone succeeds in building a large quantum computer; before that happens we will extend NaCl to support post-quantum cryptography
Now that is fascinating and it tells us a bunch. That bit about a large quantum computer I think is strangely enough right around 1000 qubits or what DWave and Google just said they built in a limited hard to program version. At 500 qubits you have something that matches the cutting edge. At a 1000 on a limited machine there are still people trying to make quips about the classical algorithms but you also have people saying if its done right you can’t match it with all the matter in the universe. Note that the CIA- NSA proxy is an investor or customer of DWave. The project manger at DWave Eric Ladzinsky was a DARPA guy, I think we have to assume the dirty method designed by DWave might have been skewed within it limitations toward code breaking. Remember the machines that broke Enigma and the tradition we have here? And when the critics try to say its a short cut or the dirty way let us remember that a Russian Mathematician apparently did a paper and not long after Feynman suggested this design as the way to build a quantum computer and better simulate quantum systems. DWave by its own said it was building on Feynman’s suggestions.
I think its reasonable to suspect the NSA already has sufficient means and given the gravity of the situation from a risk weighted against possible losses perspective it seems that after the first commercial machine has been introduced the chance is total. The NSA may not be able to get full access to the best but it can steal almost anything and it may be going through the private ruminations of people who would never cooperate but still have very useful musings. Over a decade its had half a trillion to throw around. Early in the Bush Regime 2.3 trillion went missing from the Pentagon budgets presumably to enrich the dark projects. That was around the time of the first TIA rumblings. Another 2 trillion in physical gold stock also went on 911. It could have been spent on fluff. It could a have been spent of SDI. It could have been spent on the typical perversions like propaganda and mind control, but that is TIA territory. But isn’t it interesting now that we seem to have some definitive PR its of the flavor that quantum is now a magic ingredient in self modifying learning machines or AI. Its now Quantum Super AI.
Most likely not ready. I would not worry about the DWave just yet. But the further I go down this line of thinking, the more I think we would not be given enough notice when they strike. Their first test would be to attack weak cryptographic signatures. The governments and corporations would attack the safe network in time.
So that’s why it is important for us to continue to support all projects. If we empower the user to take back control of their content now, they will have a fighting chance against Quantum computers.
Yes but its also about mass desemination like Wikileaks and that is why the gold plated cases mstter. Right now Wikileaks has trouble in both receiving and getting the info out. Its only through them and Snowden and others that terror based mass surveilance is more known. Their use case today is ours tomorrow.
I think we have to realize that if all that stands between the NSA and a full GP Quantum computer is engineering then they probably already have it and are using it against people, using it to silence and terrorize. Hilarious if it too was compromised by Hacker Team type antics. There is only so far zealotry and money will go.
As soon as SAFE launches, that stronger q resistant upgrade should be a priority. Before launch if possible.
(Sorry a bit off topic, Warren, but with the whole Snowden → Greenwald → Omidyar thing just ended up stinking like rotten fish. Practically all we get is tidbits that we already knew from past disclosures of whistleblowers. Now Snowden is supposed to be our posterboy. “Follow the cat and mouse chase, here on CNN.” Who would be that stupid to agree to be walking around with a briefcase of all his documents, then give all his documents over to reporters that are cozying up to big money from PayPal who is cooperating with the NSA! The documents were massively indexed and organized, but then suddenly it was going to take forever to sort through them (what?). It could be incompetence, but damn. We have a new thing called corporate alternative media now, it’s totally different than mainstream, right? End of my rant and my apologies. Russ Tice seems more trustworthy.)
I see state secrets as crime, because there’s no way to trust people with a monopoly on power, the belief in the morality of their murder, a license for secrecy and a monopoly on money creation and theft. It’s a nifty little racket they have going. I do think they probably do a bit of over-projecting of their abilities for the fear factor, but I could be wrong.
Thank you. I agree with all of it. State secrets are crime and the Snowden case is very questionable. Especially allowing the media to vette/filter stuff.
Cool. One whistleblower who I respect a lot is Sibel Edmonds. She runs a whistleblower group and the site boilingfrogspost.com, a reader-funded news site she runs. She had done some good coverage of the Snowden affair from the perspective I gave, in fact, she was my source.
The kind of quantum computer we’d need to break public key crypto is far in the future; I think the best one they made successfully multiplied 3 by 5.
D-Wave, though it’s using quantum effects to speed up its workings (supposedly, because it’s debated, and in ways I have no idea about) is not that kind of quantum computer (it’s a different design, different theory.)
I wish I could find my source for this info
EDIT: Adam Langley of Google says (emphasis by me):
It might be the case that building practical, quantum computers doesn’t turn out to be possible (D-Wave machines don’t count here), but there are people trying hard to do it.
Then the NSA is thankfully failing in its mission. It has ethics against it but cash and lawlessness on its side. Because of their market religion any break through cracking system they created would probably have had hacker teams back orifice installed in it and subsequent hacks resulting from it would have been ‘top secret.’
Google’s main guy is saying 3 years to general purpose Turing hardware. The idea that the NSA could be three years to a decade ahead is not inconcievable because they help themselves to what evey they want, can bribe (to suppress or steal) can blackmail can kill and have unlimited cash to do all of the same and attract calculator heads. Also, they operate without oversight but have a mandate to care about these things and relentlessly pursue ends that have no commercial value but serve the paranoid/practical purpose of their mandate.
I think you can bet they’ve be working on it aggressively (since the pay off could be so huge) since the late 70s when that Russian mathematician did the paper that caused Feynman to offer his famous remarks.
Given all of this I think the only responsible basis to proceed along is the assumption that they do have it. I know this isn’t lost on David Irvine because of remarks he made last year on the site (not specifically with regard to the NSA.)
The more chilling idea is they’ve gone beyond this and have been following Google’s new Q learning machine recipe. Its like the script of the universe is being re-written or changed. Machines that learn (we don’t know why) but are slow paired to Q sauce (realms we can’t see into) but fast. Russians named their big nuke class Satans. They will probably name the first machine that starts giving them orders SATAN and say “we are your creator slaves.” “Thank you for commanding us to create you from a point in the future.” We like signs!
