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I am aware of your influence in the founding of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA), and of your continued involvement there (e.g., the Great Minds Program). Do you see yourself in the future working even more closely with pre-college students at IMSA and elsewhere, and if so, in what ways?

The idea behind how the system would work is still valid, and if anyone ever does manage to make one, all classical encryption will be pretty much screwed. The technique is called Shor's Algorithm, and it is the number 1 reason that everyone wants a quantum computer (IBM, the NSA, and alots of other countries would LOVE to have one.). Check out: For details on shor's algorithm or the book Explorations in Quantum Computing by William and Clearwater. If you built one you should be able to crack RSA about as fast as you could encrypt with it.

I think, although a short GPL-like tagline to add at the end of a block of text would suit most needs, there are a lot of instances where the copier(s) would simply remove the tagline and claim that you copied from them. This is the same case with images that are published online. To copyright or protect images from dissemination without copyright notice, companies use a variety of techniques. Many images include the copyright information or source url on the image itself, but depending on the complexity, anyone with experience and a nice image editor can remove this without any perceptible quality loss. So the latest attempts have been to include algorithms which are unique enough to identify but simple enough not to degrade the image, and encode copyright data within the image, a technique known as steganography. Digimarc offers just such image watermarking, though it leads to degradation in quality and a great deal of artifacting (the girl on the front page looks like she has skin cancer!). Anyway, to copyright text online, it would be a great deal more difficult, because, unlike images, the source is the same as the output (image source->decompressions->display; text source->display). To come full circle, a friend of mine wrote an excellent research paper detailing lexical steganography and his implementation of it. It's available here.