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It looked like just another conference call. A panel of suited men sat at a table, large white name tags and water bottles before them. The man in the center, illuminated by fluorescent lights, spoke to a camera in front of him.
[...] The mics, cameras, and screens made for a seemingly ordinary—maybe even boring—meeting-by-telepresence. But behind the scenes, physicists were encrypting the videostream using arguably the most secure technology in existence. Bai and his colleagues were participating on the first-ever intercontinental, quantum-encrypted video conference.
And on Friday, the Chinese and Austrian researchers who engineered the call published how they did it in Physical Review Letters. Led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China, the team relied on networks of optical fiber, a handful of encryption algorithms, and a $100 million satellite that China launched in 2016—the only one specifically designed for quantum cryptography. "They've demonstrated a full infrastructure," says Caleb Christensen, the chief scientist at MagiQ Technologies, which makes quantum cryptography systems that connect a small number of users. "They've connected all the links. Nobody's done that with [quantum encryption] ever."
Story at: Wired
(Score: 4, Informative) by leftover on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:40PM (6 children)
It is certainly not quantum encryption, despite the implied claim in the title, and the claim of quantum key exchange is not validated by anything in the abstract. Are they trying to say they accomplished entanglement at an orbital distance? That would be ... bold. What it really seems to me is they had a set of Magic Boxes at routers in a fiber network and these boxes sprinkled Quantum Holy Water onto the transactions at several different places. All actual work is provided by ordinary cryptographic key exchange, which works well.
Making actual advances in cryptography is very hard work, typically by multiple exceptionally bright people. Same for making advances in quantum theory, with even fewer people available who can contribute. The difference between the two is that cryptography has a long history of actual working systems. Not so with quantum systems. Claiming advances in in building actual working quantum systems needs to be accompanied by correspondingly impressive evidence.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:19PM (3 children)
Gotta love the S/N-published peer-reviews of scientific papers... they are so in-depth analyzed, so well argued... In addition, many such reviews are based on attempts to reproduce, right?
And it is a known fact of life that neither the Chinese nor the Austrians are capable of 'producing' vary bright people. Dixit!
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by leftover on Monday January 22 2018, @12:55AM (2 children)
My point, perhaps very weakly stated, was that the entire Earth has only a few people who can make advances in quantum theory. The current body of theory does not support implementation and the current implementation fits and starts do not inform theory. In this environment, skepticism is the appropriate first response to any claims. Not malice. Not blind acceptance.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 22 2018, @01:19AM
Agreed. With both the characterization of your point and the normal expected reaction.
(normal reaction that I think is inclusively applicable to the assertion of "the entire Earth has only a few people who can make advances in quantum theory." - as such, is a "argumentum ad verecundiam" with a lightweight presence for the "authority making the assertion". But I'll admit I don't have enough time to properly check this assertion).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday January 22 2018, @03:41PM
Relevant : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wHKBavY_h8 [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday January 22 2018, @08:59AM
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/china-s-quantum-satellite-achieves-spooky-action-record-distance [sciencemag.org]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pvanhoof on Monday January 22 2018, @10:00AM
A SHA2017 presentation I recently saw that mentions in technical depth what the Chinese are up to can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHAXme8bPR0 [youtube.com]