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Comment by eoinmurray92 | Hacker News Reader

It can be used to share a cipher (one-time-pad) because you and I would know the arrangement of bits that the other person has, and no-one else would/could know. However the measurements on the qubit's are probabilistic, so we cannot control the arrangement of bit that we have. We will only know if the are correlated/anti-correlated.

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I still live in hope we'll find a way to use it for communication. A system where you had to use a slower-then-light synchronization signal to maintain the entangled state, but didn't actually transmit information over non-entangled bands, would fundamentally revolutionize communication none-the-less.

Being able to send data across the Pacific at essentially the speed of light, which was uninterceptable, would still be a massive breakthrough. Work on "weak" measurements of superpostioned systems interests me to that end (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_measurement)

I am quite confident that quantum dots will be able to do this sort of thing soon (10yrs). They are shown to be reliable and resistant to decoherence.

I don't know much about that weak measurement stuff, only in really theoretical situations thus far. But it seems a nice way to probe entanglement.

Toshiba @ Cambridge have recently shown QKD over broadband networks over 90km using single photon sources.

Before that the distance record was held by Tyndall in Ireland.

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