What a hopeless article. Yes, real quantum computing would be cool, and D-Wave has been doing quantum-y things with investor money for a decade or so, and scientists have developed improved more standard kinds of quantum computers to the point that they can now factor 21, surpassing the record of factoring 15 that held for a few years, and maybe sometime in the future quantum computers will be as far advanced beyond that as today's rockets are beyond the ones Goddard had on paper a century ago or his early flying models 90 years ago, or maybe not (or maybe both at once, because YOU CAN DO THAT with quantum.)

But like most articles about quantum stuff in the popular press, and 99.9999% of content about it in the New Age business, it follows the paradigm of

1. I don't understand quantum!
2. I can imagine really cool things that I don't understand how to make!
3. ????
4. PROFIT! , err, Therefore, quantum is how to make really cool things I want! QED!

Quantum physics isn't a Simple Matter Of Engineering like rocketry (and there are reasons for the phrase "Rocket Scientist" - rocketry's also more than just a S.M.o.E, no matter what you remember from those Heinlein stories you read as a kid about building spaceships in your back yard.) Mathematics and physics breakthroughs don't just happen because you really really want them to or because you pour lots of money into the engineering (though especially for the physics, that really helps.)

And yes, D-Wave might be on to something, or they might be pursuing a dead end, and we'd learn valuable things by helping them do either one, if they publish enough detail about their work, and maybe they can build quantumy computers that are useful for real-world problems even if you can't use them to run Shor's Algorithm to crack factoring-based crypto. But just because rocketry was at sort of a cusp a century ago, and lots of other technologies have gone from "not ready/usable yet" to "useful" that doesn't mean that quantum computing is one of them; lots of other technologies have gone from "not ready/usable yet" to "old obsolete dead ends."

Sure. Buzzfeed, Gawker Media, or the worst of all, Answers.com.

The downside is that the games will only run when the computer is turned off.

And there are a bunch of similar applications for which you might want to be able to verify that the mail's only going where it should, and that it won't stick around as a legal record longer than you want it to.

It's a radio transmitter feeding a closed waveguide. One has to ask: why haven't we seen evidence of radio transmission providing thrust before, when it's been feeding an open waveguide?

Extreme claims require extreme evidence. People who have made extreme claims before without much evidence at all are rightly categorized with the boy who cried wolf.

This approach to special-handling-required email is pretty common - if the recipient has the right software (client / app / browser extension / whatever), their email client can read it directly, otherwise they have to use a web link to the provider's server. The more secure and scalable versions store only keys of some kind on the server, and include the encoded or encrypted message in the email, the simpler but less scalable and less secure ones keep it on the server and just include a link in the email.

Disappearing Inc did that back in 2000 for a self-destructing email application, and I've seen similar things for encrypted mail (e.g. Voltage Secure Mail) and other applications (often marketed as "Data Loss Prevention" or whatever), mostly for corporate users.

And yeah, if I get email from some random stranger saying "You've received a Whiffly-Mail Message, Click Here to Download", it's going in the spam bucket, but if I get it from somebody I regularly deal with I'm fairly likely to open it. Can't be much worse than opening a Microsoft Word document from a stranger. And of course, if it's from Paypal or SomeBigBank or Microsoft Technical Support, it gets junked as well.

Yes, you could implement it by storing the message contents on a server, but the non-LOL version that Disappearing Inc implemented back in ~2000 sent the encrypted message to the recipient, and only kept the key on the server. If you had a client at the recipient's end, it would fetch the key, otherwise you'd paste it into an SSL form on a web browser that would decrypt it. DI would delete the key after whatever business rules you liked (typically N days, or read-N-times, or "recipient clicks Delete", or sender clicks "Ooops.", etc.)

Does this keep the whole message on the server or just the keys? Hopefully the latter, because it's more secure, but I don't know.

Back in 2000, a company called Disappearing Inc. made a presentation to the Bay Area Cypherpunks meeting about their product, which was pretty similar except that back then most people used real email clients instead of webmail. When the guy walked in, and we were expecting him to be pushing some kind of snake oil, he started out by saying that their threat model was to let cooperating people have some guarantee that their email would go away when they wanted it to, not to keep uncooperative people from doing that because you just can't stop screenshots / cameras / sender saving a copy / etc. and anybody trying to sell you that is selling snake oil. And suddenly he had a friendly audience, instead of one that was going to beat him up, because he'd defined a problem that could be believably solved, which was cool.

So the trick is that the file's in an encrypted format, and Disappearing Inc's server keeps the keys and a delete date for them, and if the sender and recipient are both using their product, the reader program/plugin/etc. fetches the key from DI's server; if not, you drop the file into an SSL-encrypted web form on DI which decrypts it for you. When the delete date hits (or earlier, if the file's set for read-only-once), DI deletes their copy of the key, so the recipient's mail box now has an encrypted binary blob file with no decryption key. Yes, if the server gets compromised, it's all toast. Yes, if the recipient's email client or browser is compromised at the time they read it, it's all toast. But if nobody's trying to subpoena or crack the message until after the key's deleted, then it's too late to recover old messages, though you can always try to attack new ones.

It was a nice system, and they stayed in business a couple of years before getting bought by somebody who got bought by somebody and disappearing into dead-dot-com-space. Similar systems have been sold by various other companies, often under category names like "Data Loss Protection".

If you wanted to do a "no forwarding" version, you'd do it by setting rules on who could access it, whether by IP address or some ID in the reader plugin or delete-after-one-read or whatever.

Yeah, it was a cute name. The folks running it had a clue, knew what they could and couldn't realistically do.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

Oh, cry me a river. Drone operators no longer have an unlimited right to invade people's privacy and endanger their safety. Sorry dude, but the airspace is common property and it's sensible to regulate its use for the common good. Either that, or we can have drone wars, where people who don't want your drones in the skies fly their own to take them down.

The only way I could see this as being politically motivated is if Hillary asked the Obama Administration to launch an inquiry in order to find her 100% clear of the charges, so as to remove that bugbear from the debate in the future.

So basically what you're saying is that you'd like to see the Obama Administration sink the same level as the Bush Administration when administering justice? Wouldn't it be better if Obama's Justice Department did the right thing and set the bar high for future administrations? Or is this just a case of "Their team got the kid gloves treatment, so mine should get it as well?"

Aside from the 120 million year old part...