@eggman.eth
On a more serious note re: post-quantum cryptography
One of the more frightening things to me about entering a world where our current encryption standards become useless, is the decades of data harvesting that preceded it.
You can assume that pretty much every packet youâve ever sent or received has been intercepted and stored. Itâs just sitting there idle and useless for the time being, as the encryption protecting that packet canât be broken.
Once quantum compute becomes accessible at any sort of state level (let alone corporate or personal levels), the decryption process on all those packets will start.
Every password, every credit card number, every private conversation, every photo youâve ever sent - itâs now in plaintext for anyone to read.
I used to think only very high profile targets (heads of state, military etc) need worry about this, and for the public itâd just mean more annoyingly well-targeted ads.
Now that LLMs and Vision models are in the mix, thatâs not really the case anymore. A search query like âfind me my neighbourâs private pics and also any incriminating private chatsâ can actually yield results now.
I think people are unaware of what a massive societal upheaval this will cause. The whole pre-quantum worldâs entire digital footprint is likely to wind up indexed and easily searched by something as user-friendly as ChatGPT.
The only real solace here is that itâs plausible that only massive state powers would have the capability to store all this traffic for a mass harvest now/decrypt later op. So, if you trust the US government, maybe they wonât mis-use it.
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