Well, as I pointed out, there are other quantum effects that have lead to drastic changes in our entire way of life, as we have learned to harness them. Discarding any new discovery with the word "quantum" in the name as being useless on our scale is silly. Thing is, in order to impress a layman, you have to have an immediate application that they can hold in their hand. When the laser was invented, we didn't have CD drives, and the laymen were "meh" about lasers too. It's the nature of new discoveries that they don't have applications that make sense to laymen yet. Application comes after discovery (sometimes decades after, as in the case of the laser, I believe).

I can certainly see your point, as I too have seen a parade of "ooh neato" discoveries floating by on the stream of science, never to be heard from again, but again, don't pan them out of hand.

Yeah, I mean, quantum tunneling? Quantum confinement? Those effects totally just cancel out and never do us any good!

C'mon guys. I've never seen a response so short-sighted as to discard a physics breakthrough so quickly.

Indeed, and in fact this concept plays a large role in the middle book of the Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds (which I recommend that you read, if you have not).

Fine, their "allegedly shady" acts. My point still stands. Nobody expected them to walk up to Congress and say "yeah, we totally grabbed all this wifi data that people didn't know we were taking." I'm not even making any statements about the morality or legality of Google's actions. I'm just saying, the content of TFS is in no way surprising.

FWIW, I metamodded you up, so don't take this in any way personally.

A major corporation fibs to the government about their shady acts? Say it isn't so! We all knew this was going to be how it went down from the time the Wi-fi sniffing was first announced. There's no surprise here. There really isn't much more to say about it. We've covered the shadiness of the whole thing at length in other stories, and it's really barely news at all that Google is trying to snow Congress about it...

The whole idea behind this is that you'd be able to encrypt your data, upload it to your cloud provider, and use their hardware to do a bunch of work on it, without ever decrypting it. The reason why this is attractive is because you don't want your cloud provider looking at your data. If you can sort your data by plaintext, while still in ciphertext form (ie, without decrypting it on the cloud's hardware AT ALL), then what's stopping your cloud provider from doing it, too? You're leaking information about your data to your provider, and if they wanted to, they could perform a process of elimination and discover your plaintext.

Note, sorting is only ONE example of a class of algorithms that might have to be performed. Pretty much any useful algorithm would in some way leak information about the plaintext, in a way that would be visible to people who don't have your private key. That defeats the whole purpose. Might as well just upload all your data XOR encrypted.

The thing to keep in mind here is that the idea is to make it so your cloud provider has no way to read, or infer information about, your data. I'm in the camp that believes it's not possible, but even if it is possible, known methods (like this one) are neither plausible nor secure.

No. You're not capturing the magnitude of how few operations we have at our disposal with FHE. We can add, and we can multiply, and we can compare ciphertexts. Those are the three basic operations you can perform. Even if you could somehow divine the proper sorting of plaintexts, based upon their ciphertexts (And I'm even ignoring the fact that that would leak information like a sieve, for now), you'd have to go through god knows how many hundreds of add/multiply/compare iterations to do it. It's just not feasible.

Now, to address that little point I said I was ignoring. If you can discern ANYTHING about the plaintext from the ciphertext, it means your encryption is leaking. However, in order to do anything useful with cloud computation, you HAVE to be able to know about the ciphertext. How many "cloud" operations do you have at your workplace where you process data blindly adding and multiplying? Imagine an actuarial scenario: You've got a bunch of (encrypted) policy data that you've uploaded to the cloud for rating. The premium rate for a policy depends on dozens or hundreds of variables. Everything from where you live to whether your car has power windows. Without being able to discern that information from the ciphertext, you can't properly rate the policy. But if you can discern the information, you've defeated the entire purpose of your encryption.

It's neat math, but I don't see how it can be used to do anything useful, while still protecting your data.

So, I've got this encrypted data, and I can do these operations to it and it'll still be encrypted blah blah blah. I want to alphabetically sort some data. If I'm reading this right, you're screwed. Not seeing the utility, if that's the case.

You are searching the Internet. I'm not sure what context is lost by using the search box instead of navigating to google.com. I can understand your point about the Windows search, but the Internet doesn't have subdirectories, and you don't have a working folder in it.

From what I've seen of the KDE devs, you'd be exactly wrong on that front. New features are always prioritized because they're exciting, while bugfixes get ignored. I don't have the link handy, but awhile back I saw a bug report regarding (iirc) icon opacity, that had stagnated for years. From everything I've seen, the devs aren't as interested in making sure everything works flawlessly as they are in being progressive.

Doesn't dark matter have to interact via gravity in order to be responsible for the things it's claimed to be responsible for? If that's the case, why didn't it react with anything? It's not as though the regular matter was interacting through electromagnetic, weak, or strong forces in any significant way during the collision. Gravity should have effected both types of matter equally, shouldn't it?

Your teeth weighed ten pounds? My god, man!

+0, Cute?

Doesn't matter what we call the two things. We just know that in this case, one requires the other.

So that's why fat people live shorter lives! Time really just moves faster for them, because they have more mass!