The MoD has got their hands on a quantum computer, courtesy of our friends over at ORCA Computing. This is a game-changer, yet it isn’t getting too much exposure in the press. So wtf is a quantum computer? It’s a PC that can work at silly speeds and handle silly amounts of data. Computers have limits, limits to their processing speeds and resulting outputs. Because of these limits we can do stuff like set secure passwords and know it’d take a basic computer a hundred years to comb through all password possibilities before it found yours. Increase its processing power, you can reduce that 100 years, dramatically. Many tech solutions are floating around the world built on the fact that it’d take a computer too long to do what we don’t want it to do. Take encryption. A lock that is available for everyone to see yet you only hold the key. Now someone could come and try every key possibility in the world but that’d take them ages, way too long for it to be a usable, successful method. But say they could try keys 160 million times faster, it wouldn’t take them long to find the right key for your lock.

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A large amount of our society is built on encryption. It’s become a standard for most industries, best practice, often you’ll miss it unless you’re looking for it but trust me its there.
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The MoD can make use of quantum computing in ways that you and I couldn’t due to their exposure to data we are kept in the dark on. If it becomes known that the Russians are using the Tor Network to handle communications, odds are the UK could put their ORCA to work decrypting that traffic. Scary stuff. If the UK comes across heavily encrypted hard drives that hold valuable data, it’s just become a little more likely that they could read those files.
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Now, illegal decryption is available throughout the world to some extent. In the past, we’ve seen high-profile criminals taken down due to the apparent cracking of encryption. The thing that’s complicating the game is the exposure of these methods. We’ve seen criminals brought down, taken to court and released shortly after because the authority that brought them down refuses to make it known how they did so, likely because the methods they have access to are new, they’re secret and frankly the rest of the world hasn’t caught up. Let’s say an authority can crack Tor Networking, using that as evidence requires a full breakdown of what they did and how, 2 days later Tor would be patched and the method made redundant.
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So where am I going with this? Well being blunt there isn’t a huge amount of real-world uses for quantum computing just yet. It’s like buying a Bugatti, the fastest road-legal car in the world but you’ve gotta drive it on UK roads at UK speed limits. Until the software equivalent of a racetrack is built, this computer will sit in an MoD office revving its engine.

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Song of the week

lay on the floor, cat lay on my chest.

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I’m stroking him, telling him how good his life is. How he’ll never have a mortgage, never crash a car, never break someone’s heart, he’s never been broke and how he’s completely oblivious to all of this. Ignorant bliss.

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Which got me thinking, with the universe having infinite possibilities and all, maybe somewhere there’s a being that would lie on the floor and I curl up on their chest, for them to scratch my head and tell me how easy my life is compared to theirs.

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Telling me stuff like I’ll never forget to top up my intergalactic travel card, I’ll never have to pay Milkyway Tax, I’ve never had to have a neurogenic sonic transmitter installed in my spine, how I get my oxygen for free, how my life is easy beyond belief. Ignorant bliss.

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So idk why I stress about stuff, in the grand scheme of things, I’m the cat.

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imagine having a stress like that, like losing something on the universal equivalent of the tube

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It’d go something like this. I should make a galaxy tube map, brb

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hey Mr Musk well here’s the thing, I was heading over to Axiona-5 this morning for a bag of those bagels from Galaxi MegaMart, you know the ones ;)

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Anyway, so I take the Space X line from Earth to A-(8) and swap onto the Bypass to PrimeStar, save a bit of time, then back onto Space X, 1 stop to Axiona-5. Somewhere along the way, I lost my Travel Card so I didn’t get to tap out back at Earth and now I’m gonna be charged for a full day of intergalactic travel when I only really went like 3,000 lightyears? You know?

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Plus the photo on my card, the stupid droid took it when I had my eyes closed so it’ll be hard to prove it’s my card? I have a picture, I’ll put it below.

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So yeah I could do without being charged for the day-pass because well I ain’t a billionaire plus a new Travel Card would be nice.

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Thanks,
Matty

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men cherish compliments like shinies off that show what was it called

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The Shiny Show – CBeebies

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sometimes the emotional equivalent of a ball of scrunched up tinfoil is all a man needs to find love

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I once got dangerously close to falling for a girl in the smoking area of a club after she watched me try and fail to drunkenly scratch my back only to turn me around and finish the job in a soft but dominant manner

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its games like this that I’ll never win

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I swear long term qualifications like degrees, they’re just a test to see how well you can concentrate on something -trust me I can do this shit but I’m not stopping along the way to catch you up

Thinking of swapping sides. It’s like when you were a kid playing football and life just seemed better on the other team. I’ll have a think on it

It’s all a game mate, just a big game of Monopoly.

This shouldn’t make me feel genuine sympathy because we’re talking about a hunk of metal, an object, with no feelings.

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Satellites are operational (they live) for around 10 years.

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Right now, there are ≈5,000 floating around in space.

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≈3,000 of them are dead, useless, with no fuel, no nothing.

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The other ≈2,000 are hard at work, facilitating wars and pinging your phone for traffic updates. Quite the varied work life.

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When a satellite reaches its end, which is usually due to its lack of fuel, its controller either nudges its trajectory to come down to Earth and burn up in our oxygen-rich atmosphere or sends it out into space, to glide into nothingness for the rest of its life.

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I don’t know which is worse, being sent to your inevitable death, going out in a fiery blur across our sky or being sent out to explore the universe, alone. Whatever you find, whatever you see lives and dies within your mind.

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Guess it comes down to the mortal vs immortal existence argument. The whole “The Gods don’t like us because they’re jealous we can die and they can’t.”

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Then again, it’s just a chunk of metal, going through the journey of sustaining intelligent human life on Earth onto its demise, finding itself as space junk, just interplanetary litter.

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I keep trying to dumb this down to a level I can live with but keep seeing it as truly, a very deep topic.

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I need a new hobby.

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Song of the week, what i’d listen to floating off into space

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