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Comment by eightysixfour | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else read the last two paragraphs as “I AM NOT ALLOWED TO TELL YOU THINGS YOU SHOULD BE VERY CONCERNED ABOUT” in bright flashing warning lights or is it just me?

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It is more, many companies can't do what they claim to do, or they have done it once at best and had no more consistency. I sense most companies in the quantum computing space right now are of this ilk. As someone that works in academic and private quantum computing research, repeatability and methodology are severely lacking, which always rings alarm bells. Some companies are funded off the back of one very poor quality research paper, reviewed by people who are not experts, that then leads to a company that looks professional but behind the scenes I would imagine are saying Oh shit, now we actually have to do this thing we said we could do.

He's making it sound that way, although he might plausibly deny that by claiming he just doesn't want to speculate publicly.

Either way he must have known people would read it like you did when he wrote that; so we can safely assume it's boasting at the very least.

I don't think he is saying that. As I said in my other comment here I think he is just drawing a potential parallel to other historic work that was done in a private(secret) domain. The larger point is we simply don't know so it's best to act in a way that even if it hasn't been done already it certainly seems like it will be broken. Hence the move to Post-Quantum Cryptography is probably a good idea!

Aaronson says:

> This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems...

That has a clear implication that he knows something that he doesn't want to say publically

a crypto system is expected to resist for 30 years.

it doesnt need to be imminent for people to start moving now to post-quantum.

if he thinks we are 10 years away from QC, we need to start moving now

Very much so. But the specificity and severity of what he knows is not clear just from this. Not necessarily to the point of "bright flashing warning lights" as the top-level comment put it. Anyway, I certainly am glad that people are (as far as I can tell?) more or less on top of the post-quantum transition.

Yes, it can easily just mean that he has some kind of inside information about progress that he doesn't want to divulge, but this is still far from "crypto is broken, guize"

Still, if that's true, it's an example of the very thing Scott's talking about: there are advances in the field that aren't being made public.

You are right, my bad. I must have speed read that last sentence. I won't delete my comment because there was some good discussion.

Just you

I ran it through ROT13, base64, reversed the bits, and then observed it....The act of decoding collapsed it into ...not imminent...

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