Obama Is Sanctioning Russia Because...

It would be all the more amazing if they didn't. Interfering in our electoral process to give us some turkey like Trump goes to the heart of our governmental process.

 

Yeah, and Russian Hacking voted for Brexit too.

 

Don't post when you're intoxicated.

 

They're all going at it like so many wolves fighting over a feast, with the US even sometimes baiting them just looking for an excuse to retaliate in some specific way. These guys are often just the sneaker versions of the likes of Idi Amin Dada and Dr Strangelove and you really don't want to know what they do in bed.

 

I ain't drunk or high. It's hard to sound sarcastic in text format.

I won't be surprised if we hear half the country blaming all their problems on Russian hackers over the next 5 years.

 

Russian hackers tucked my job.

 

Russian hackers justify the NSA reading everyone's emails and the US starting a new computer arms race. Within three years Google has announced they intend to have a 50 qubit quantum computer and several other attempts are being made to create a full-scale quantum computer sometime within the next five years. Ideally, such a computer would have anywhere from 150-300 qubit number crunching capacity with 300 being so much computational power that its as much as anyone on the planet can think of what to do with and can do that without the slightest fuss trying to program it or whatever. The Australians, in particular, are doing amazing things with silicon that all the theorists believed impossible meaning it might even be possible to mass produce the damned things or even daisy chain them just to see what happens.

A single 100 qubit or better quantum computer could crack just about any computer on the planet and wreak complete havoc. As a result, others are rushing to produce some way to defeat their cryptographic prowess and there are several options people are exploring, but it's always easier to destroy things than it is to defend them. Quantum mechanics may prove the exception to that rule, but it will require analog logic that may have to wait until the first full-scale quantum computers are created and can crunch the numbers on the best way to do it. Should be interesting to follow the action if everyone in the world can suddenly hold the US at gunpoint and demand better treatment, but we'll have to wait and see what happens. The Russians and Chinese hacking everyone right now is nothing compared to what's coming because, even assuming someone comes up with a good way to defeat these new computers, my guess is it will require at least ten or twenty years for the technology to be applied to most computers.

It's the kind of shit hitting the fan scenario that makes both the Terminator and Matrix movies look a bit wimpy and naive. My own view is mother nature is coming back to reclaim the planet and she makes even speculation about a technological singularity look naive. You can fight technology, but you can't fight your own nature or the truth, at least, you can't and expect to actually get anywhere other than managing to drag your feet kicking and screaming like brat throwing a tantrum. Asians have known something like this was coming and the Native Americans knew it the minute they saw the white man cutting down trees and shooting animals just for the hell of it. Hell hath no fury like a mama scorned and mother nature is nothing like the machine westerners have always assumed.

 

Oh wow man, a new Bromance between the Democrat USA Party and the American Security Apparatus.

Has the world turned upside down?

 

Computer systems aren't 'cracked' by brute force computational power with the exception of asymmetrical encryption algorithms. Even in that case they are just exponentially reduced. Granted AES backs TLS and our entire banking system and eCommerce relies on the strength of it's cryptography. However, it's not an immediate threat, and when it becomes so, will simply require stronger cryptography.

There's already known mathematically unbreakable cryptography. One Time Pads. They're just exceptionally unpractical, which is why we rely on diffie hellman. However, it turns out the solution to setting up reliable One Time Pads also involves a quirk of quantum mechanics. Quantum Cryptography. It allows you to exchange a One Time Pad and be assured it has not been viewed. (The observation of a Q-Bit will change it.)

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2015/481824/

 

The major banks and organizations like the NSA might be safe enough for awhile due to them already often using quantum encryption, but the problem is the rest of the planet will be left wide open and the infrastructure simply doesn't exist to protect them. The cost of protecting every server on the planet is just way too much at this point in time and, even if it does come down radically in the near future, it will require years to implement. In the meantime, eCommerce is growing by leaps and bounds and any serious disruption could cripple the economy, not to mention, all the secrets that would be easily accessible to countless people. Even now the fact that email accounts and most businesses are relying upon simple password keys is a threat to the economy because most of them can be cracked in 30 seconds by any kid with a graphics card. Intel and others are attempting hybrid solutions of incorporating cryptography into the hardware itself to make it cheaper to use longer and more complex codes, but they've had mixed success. Sony and Yahoo being two of the best examples in recent years of large commercial companies encountering serious financial losses due to hackers obtaining information on millions of customers.

One time pads are WWII technology and, already, the US is experimenting with using entangled photons sent up to satellites in orbit for exchanging keys and other approaches to making them more practical, but that's still immature technology. I'm no expert on such things but, to the best of my knowledge, having a full scale quantum computer would mean you can use it crack the mathematics of cryptographic systems rather than their codes making the cryptographic system itself useless overnight. In particular, quantum computers are good for problems of the Traveling Salesman variety. Being able to crunch numbers on the order of 300 factoral means codes would either have to become ridiculously long and impractical or we would have to change the infrastructure itself to support quantum cryptography with neither option being terribly practical at this point in time.

 

So no, quantum computers don't work by attacking algorithms. They work in breaking cryptography in the exact same way that silicon computers do. By brute force. The difference is that in silicon chips, something has to be a bit. a 1 or a 0. To brute force the cyphertext, you have to try all combinations of those. Quantum computers qubits exist in a superposition of both states. That allows them to effectively short circuit some unnecessary computations. This does present a problem to asymmetric encryption algorithms. However, symmetric algorithms can be protected by simply doubling the key size. But in any case, doubling the size of the key will will exponentially increase the amount of work needed to solve it. In the short term, effective countermeasures could be used by simply using 4096 bit RSA keys and 256 bit AES. The cost of that is somewhat more computationally expensive, and one of the many ways that's being addressed in modern computers is dedicated cryptographic hardware. The difference in 128 bit AES vs 256 bit AES isn't double. it's x^128 vs x ^256.

One Time Pads were constructed in the 1880's, and are unbreakable. The math behind them being so is rather simple. The problem is in secure key transfer, which is where the quantum encryption method you've mentioned by satellites comes into play.

One of the few good things to come out of the Yahoo hack, was that they were BCrypt. So we're looking at speeds of breaking that of like 1-2/ kH/s vs 3000 MH/s for MD5. Effectively making brute force impossible.

https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-1958.html

I'm pretty confident that the treat posed by quantum machines and algorithms will be mitigated by the time they're available, this is a problem that's very actively being worked on, and has been for quite a while. I wrote a paper about it in high school a dozen years ago.

 

The latest estimates I've come across suggest that within twenty years, at the outside, even conventional computers should be able to reveal the mathematical foundations of a theory of everything. While people normally think of such a theory as merely being applicable to physics what it means, among other things, is that the foundations of mathematics and logic themselves will be revealed. A quantum computer with anywhere from 164 qubits to 300 at the outside should be able to produce the same results and much more. A few, such as IBM, are already attempting to combine both quantum and classical computers on the same chip with IBM's attempt utilizing a liquid quantum computer that surrounds the core chip that combines both isolating them from environmental noise. However, that's an exotic approach and with advances in photonics and plasmonics it appears they may be the first to succeed. A classical Von Neumann plasmonic chip can theoretically operate at speeds of over 270 thz or, roughly, a million times faster than today and would make an ideal match for a quantum computer.

The problem I've come across with most discussions of the future of cryptography is they tend to extrapolate from current quantum mechanics which are all formulated in six dimensions using classical causal mathematics which all the evidence gathered by both the physicists and mathematicians increasingly indicates doesn't apply because reality is contextual rather than causal. Contextual reality would obey pattern matching implying that, once you have the mathematical foundations, merely by crunching larger numbers and comparing patterns it should be possible to defeat any encryption a less powerful computer can utilize. While all that might sound a bit futuristic and far fetched, all it requires to turn it into reality is a quantum computer of at least 164 qubits. The next scientific revolution is upon us and the last one brought us pretty much everything we have now including the atom bomb, with Einstein once drawing a laser on a napkin and showing it to a friend commenting that nobody would be able to make one for another fifty years.

 

Here's the proof!

I eat my own words as I was wrong this whole time....

 

What about the Bromance between trump and Putin? And they said the Republicans were against gay marriage! It must have been those shirtless Putin photos.