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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [aps.org] 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 [wired.com] 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 [wired.com]

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