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Using Diamonds to Create Unhackable Code
IAmTheDave writes "Researchers at Melbourne University have grown diamond particles 1/1000 of a millimetre on optical fibres which they can use to transmit single photons of light at a time. The diamonds are grown on the optical fiber by raining carbon molecules onto the tip of the fiber. They claim that by transmitting information in single photons, any interception of transmitted photons will be useless to the interceptor, and thus the message will be completely unhackable. Transmission speeds are currently slow - 120km/h, but are expected to speed up."
wow, i got another one!
Cool!
By the way FP
The moral of the story is: "Always remember to mount a scratch monkey."
hey, what's that smell?
You would think that ordinary encryption would be much more than sufficient for anything less than the NSA.
Diamond is one of the most common gemstones in the world. It would have virtually no value if a) DeBeers hadn't pulled the greatest marketing spinjob in history convincing people today that diamond rings are a centuries old wedding tradition, not a decades old one and b) they didn't warehouse them.
DeBeers has warehouses of bins, floor to ceiling of diamonds they keep off the market to artificially inflate their value. By controlling access to virtually all the mines that are econimical to exploit, they ensure competitors with access to diamond deposits will not flood the market with cheap ones.
You see, nowadays, when you want to facet a gemstone into the shapes most people have come to expect in jewelry, one has to use abrasives to put the faces in the stone. Usually Silicon Carbide grit (9.5 hardness, usually for softer stones) or diamond (10 hardness, for harder stuff) on a spinning disk to grind into the stone. But this doesn't work for all gemstones, notably diamond. Trying to facet a diamond with diamond grit on a lap (the disk) will just cut gouges into your lap. They are not cheap.
So diamonds still have to be done the hard way: roughly shaping the stone by cleaving, then using 2 diamonds, one of poor quality, to rub the faces into the good diamond. If this stuff can be synthesized in different grits (particle sizes) for fairly cheap, then it can be used to facet diamonds with machinery rather than by hand. Much of a diamonds (and most other stones) value is actually from the labor put into faceting it. This is especially so for smaller stones. How cheap? Well, currently lapidaries are paying for synthetic diamond grit...
The parent post was brought to you by the GNU FDL
Free Manning, jail Obama.
C is the universal language. You can do anything in C. Well, unless you want object-orientation. Or decent string handling. Or readable code.
You have to give us some kind of token to identify yourself. Otherwise, you're just any Joe Schmoe. In fact, I hereby claim your first post as my own. Without any kind of identificaiton, who's going to stop me? Your first post now belongs to me, bitch.
Which is better?
Star Trek
Star Wars