IBM Tech Detects & Changes Spin of Single Electron

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like we have another step forward in Quantum Computing - IBM has discovered how to detect and change the spin of a single electron. Won't be long before we're all solving impossible encryption problems. "

Comments

What happens if encryption becomes impossible

[ErroneousBee]

So what do we do if quantum computers can decrypt anything in almost real-time?

All I can think of is making the data streams uninterceptable, which leads us back to encoders/decoders built using quantum entanglement.

the key to rebecca

[goombah99]

Well I guess its just back to security through obscurity.

A while back there was a proposal to have a public onetime pad system that worked like this. there is a server, perhaps a sattelite, that is streaming random numbers at say gigabytes per second. To encode a message you weakly encrypt a prior message to the recipient telling him a precise start time: say the message reads: start colleting your onetime pad at the first occurence of the first 5 digits of the number pi that come after 12 noon. you both then collect the data that comes at that time and treat ti as a shared one time pad.

you opponents may be able to decrypt the pre-message eventually but not it time to make the start time. thus they cant collect the onetime pad data. the data rate of the random stream is chosen so that no plausible storage system could retain more than say a few hours worth of the data, so no one could just record it all. As long as no one can crack your message on that time scale you can dsafely send the one time pad whihc no one can crack by technical means.

Re:Innovation

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The IBM research has taken over from bell labs as being one of the best research labs around. It is such a shame bell labs went from being amazing to depressing but that is a different story.

Doubly so since it didn't have to happen.

Bell Labs was originally intended to be a boondoggle, since part of the deal for Bell's original monopoly was that they could set phone rates to make a particular profit (6%?) on every dollar they spent on building the phone system, including research. So they set up a R&D arm that was mandated to spend as much money as possible on research with some vuage connection to telephony, in the expectation of being able to make 6 cents on every dollar spent.

It was a "failure" from the first year: They were PROFITABLE, earning/saving more money from using and licensing the results of the research than they spent on doing it. On the average, basic research pays off big-time (even if you can't tell in advance what any particular project might produce). Example: The transistor.

Unfortunately, after the dissolution of the monopoly, the successor to Bell Labs became infected with the "Harvard Business School" style of short-term milking: Cut R&D (which costs money now and pays off later), creating a temporary boost in the profit figures followed by a collapse. Declare that you're a genius, cash out and move on to the next sucker company, leaving your successors to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.

Fortunately, IBM has learned both of these lessons of Bell Labs, big-time (as well as the Labs' UNIX lesson of how {essentially} giving away source code leads to lots of business for computer companies) and has become a worthy successor.