I also really like this article and am 100% supportive of people messing around and modifying their stuff.

This is why the first item in the U.S. Bill of Rights is freedom of speech and of the press. Who knows what objections anyone will have to any given statement, and forcing everyone to accommodate everyone leads to a claustrophobic dystopia.

Appeals to “transparency” are just an attempt to distract from worse outcomes.

The fatal flaw of this administration is that they care more about looks than substance. They would rather look tough and lose than look meek and win. It doesn’t even occur to them that it is possible to win while looking meek.

There are tons of hypothesized applications for quantum computing based on the expectation it will provide better simulation of quantum effects for e.g. chemistry, and offer major speedups of highly parallel simulation problems like nuclear plasma or some things in finance. Easy to Google to learn more about these.

But keeping the focus squarely on the military and intelligence services, one answer to your question is that everyone is not going to switch to post-quantum cryptography instantaneously. It’s going to take a while, especially for a long tail of “infrastructure” type things like networking gear, “internet of things,” industrial sensors, etc. Things that national intelligence services might like to break into to enable breaking into other things.

Quantum breaks may also still succeed against stored encrypted data from before the switch to PQ. And for at least a couple decades, national intelligence services have been scaling up their storage resources. So they might have a “backlog” they can work through.

Finally, things don’t have to last forever. Everything the military / government builds has an expected lifespan, and it only has to be valuable during that life span. And risks can be rare but huge in national security. So if quantum code-breaking computers only help the NSA learn a few very important things for a limited time, that still might be “worth it” to them. Or if a quantum computer doesn’t break any important cryptography, but helps advance the engineering and enables better quantum computers in the future for other anpplications—again, still might be worth it.

Personally, my reading between the lines on this subject as a non-expert is that we in the public might not know when post-quantum cryptography is necessary until quite a while after it is necessary.

Prior to the public-key cryptography revolution, the state of the art in cryptography was locked inside state agencies. Since then, public cryptographic research has been ahead or even with state work. One obvious tell was all the attempts to force privately-operated cryptographic schemes to open doors to the government via e.g. the Clipper chip and other appeals to magical key escrow.

A whole generation of cryptographers grew up in this world. Quantum cryptography might change things back. We know what papers say from Google and other companies. Who knows what is happening inside the NSA or military facilities?

It seems that with quantum cryptography we are back to physics, and the government does secret physics projects really well. This paragraph really stood out to me:

> Scott Aaronson tells us that the “clearest warning that [he] can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems” is a vague parallel with how nuclear fission research stopped happening in public between 1939 and 1940.

Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.

A closed local firewall blocking all inbound by default. Spotlight indexing. Time Machine backups. Flexible screenshot tools. Print anything to PDF. Lots of useful trackpad gestures. And after Intel, we got Rosetta, Boot Camp, easy Windows virtualization like Parallels, etc. That’s all off the top of my head, but for sure OS X had Microsoft on their back foot for years. Gates used to yell at his team about it.

I think the law is too long now, but a decade is too short to protect artists. Even a patent is 20 years.

Operationally, navies with carriers assume that opponents know where they are.

He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.