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Comment by NitpickLawyer | Hacker News Reader

My read of the recent google blog post is that they framed it as cryptocurrency related stuff just so they don't say the silent thing out loud. But lots of people "in the know" / working on this are taking it much more seriously than just cryptobros go broke. So my hunch is that there's more to it and they didn't want to say it / couldn't / weren't allowed to.

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It should be noted that quantum computers are a threat mainly for interactions between unrelated parties which perform legal activities, e.g. online shopping, online banking, notarized legal documents that use long-term digital signatures.

Quantum computers are not a threat for spies or for communications within private organizations where security is considered very important, where the use of public-key cryptography can easily be completely avoided and authentication and session key exchanges can be handled with pre-shared secret keys used only for that purpose.

I will bring this up at the next meeting of the secret cryptographer cabal where we decide what information to reveal to non-cryptographers.

What is "it" that you're referring to?

> mitigating harvest-now/decrypt-later attacks.

Most likely the NSA or someone else is ahead of the game and already has a quantum computer. If the tech news rumors are to true the NSA has a facility in Utah that can gather large swaths of the internet and process the data.

This?: https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

FYI this is a parody website. (in case it's not obvious)

It wasn't obvious to me!

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