As has been previously pointed out, the 2001 and 2012 quantum factorisation records may be easily matched with a dog trained to bark three times [33]. We verified this by taking a recently-calibrated reference dog, Scribble, depicted in Figure 6, and having him bark three times, thus simultaneously factorising both 15 and 21. This process wasn’t as simple as it first appeared because Scribble is very well behaved and almost never barks. Having him perform the quantum factorisation required having his owner play with him with a ball in order to encourage him to bark. It was a special performance just for this publication, because he understands the importance of evidence-based science.
I loved this quote as well
It is one of those domains where success would land you in a gilded prison.
Consider the likelihood of managing that without alerting the authorities to what is going on.
That being said, it's not 100% used everywhere yet (Wikipedia mentions 92.6% of websites), and various means of tricking devices into downgrading to an older protocol would result in traffic that might be decrypted later.
Both the FFDH and ECDH key agreement algorithms are vulnerable to quantum crypt-analysis; someone capturing traffic today could later break that agreement and then decrypt the data. An attacker would have to capture the entire session up to the "point of interest" though.
This is why FFDH/ECDH are being augmented with Post-Quantum secure KEMs.
But almost all that data is going to turn out to be useless if or when they gain quantum ability to decrypt it, and even the stuff that could be useful now gets less useful with every month it stays encrypted. Stuff that is very useful intelligence now could be absolutely useless in five years…
By observing DNS lookups in centralized taps like room 641a at AT&T.
So we who grew up with 500MB computers could properly communicate how big the drives "felt" at the time, compared to what we have today.
Even trying to do something like saving 'just' the average yearly traffic tor handles would account for 2-3% of all the current storage available.
We're talking about the same government that quickly abandoned their quest of 'archiving every tweet in the Library of Congress'
I'm still convinced that the simulation hypothesis is just religion for the atheist or agnostic, because if it turns out that it's correct and one day you 'wake up' only to find that it was all a simulation, well how do you know that isn't now also just another simulation? It's a non-theory. But I find this some quite compelling circumstantial evidence in favor of this non-theory. Because an arbitrary number of individuals may be able to experience "this" era throughout our species' future, yet only one group will be the one that gets to actually live it, and that group will ostensibly be orders of magnitude smaller than the sum total of all that will later 'experience' it. Statistically you're rather more likely to belong to the simulation group than the real, if these assumptions are correct.