Malware In Quantum Computing? 91
MattSparkes writes, "Today's quantum computers are not sophisticated enough to do anything malicious to your online bank account; the field is in its infancy. However, there are in theory more ways to attack quantum computers than classical ones. As quantum networking takes off, this is going to become a larger and more immediate problem." The Wikipedia article correctly identifies as an unsolved problem in physics the question of whether it is possible to construct a practical computer that performs calculations on qubits.
Links (Score:3, Funny)
(must post anonymously so people don't figure out I RTFA)
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Your security procedures, someone must have looked at the qubit representing your anonymous state.
Seconded: Article is shit (Score:2)
How is this news? You can scramble regular classical communication by cutting the wires or "inserting a logic gate" into the communication process. Hell you can scramble semaphore by inserting a barn in the wrong place.
What, did the author think because it wa
Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:2)
Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:4, Funny)
When your AV program detects it, it flies off and infects someone else's computer.
Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:5, Funny)
No, that's Windows Quantum Advantage: If Redmond observes that your copy of Windows Quantum is not Genuine, a hammer will break a vial of cyanide inside your PC, and your cat will die.
Quantum malware is what your dog installs to introduce sufficient uncertainty in Redmond's WQA check to ensure your cat's demise. (After all, when your cat's momentum is known to be precisely zero, it's gotta be somewhere around your PC.)
Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:5, Funny)
And if it's anything like my cat, it almost always will indeed have a momentum of precisely zero.
Re:Quantum Malware vs Observation (Score:4, Funny)
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Like on my friggin keyboard?
Simple solution (Score:3, Funny)
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As long as you don't put all 32 qubits into a superposition, you'll be fine. Otherwise you may be forced to pay the licensing fee to run it on 4,294,967,296 CPUs.
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Obligatory: quantum virus... (Score:4, Funny)
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Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principl e [wikipedia.org]
I remember one more on the same lines...
Mr. Heisenberg is driving on the free way and a police officer stopped him for speeding. Officer walks up to Heisenberg's car and asks him, "Sir, do you know how fast you are going?" Mr. Heisenberg said "Officer, I have no idea how fast I am going, but I know exactly where I am."
Where there are worms... (Score:2, Funny)
These are normally found where there is an abundance of tachyon emissions.
Make a sensor for those and we can remove the wormholes and finally get rid of the worms.
QED
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Re:Virus Destroys Universe (Score:5, Funny)
The first guy to discover he has been hacked.... (Score:1, Funny)
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blue sky speculation (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this really even a story? We may as well be worrying about where to buy reliable crossbows once the atomic wars destroy civilization.
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I agree, but my "Ask Slashdot" article on the subject was rejected.
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This is the same thing as a virus that erases/corrupts your hard-drive.
Computer viruses have come a long way since then, and so will "quantum malware." The real point is that this is the first paper of it's kind (in nearly 2 decades of research on quantum computing).
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So a PC with a Maxtor harddrive is like a quantum computer?
yes it is too early to think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, but when immortality becomes possible, just think of the new pressures on the Earth's resources. Yet I'm going to bet those irresponsible doctor and medical researcher types haven't thought at all about this as they try to cure cancer and so forth.
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Well, if there was immortality, we wouldn't have much stopping us from searching the galaxy for more resources would we ?
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I'm waiting for the protests from the new PETA...
People for the Ethical Treatment of Asteroids.
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Trojan Condoms - Doing their part to save the galaxy.
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1. USA offers all French seniors free immortality pills. (who would want to die?)
2. French govt. checks for retirement never end, so they must raise taxes each year.
3. Young educated people can't take the taxes, they leave and come to America.
4. France is screwed because they are broke an
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I always thought that immortality could be used as a stealth weapon, albeit a slow one. Pretend there is a country you don't like but can't legally go to war with.
...so you elect a Republican president and bomb the hell outta them anyways. "legal, shmegal" be damned. Much cheaper than immortality drugs.
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First of all, retiring is only a viable option when society (and the insurance companies) know that you are going to kick the bucket (statistically) soon after starting to cash out on the retirement money.
"Retiring" as a concept will be abolished, because the only reason for retiring is growing too old to be a productive cog in the machinery.
Sidenote: I wonder how people would do things differently with regards to their work if they were, essentially, never going to die of age.
Of course, society
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I think you're right except for the "too early to think about it" part. Why wouldn't we want to think about the possible consequences of our inventions? Must we make all our mistakes and screw things up before we start thinking about them, or can't we try to consider the problems we might be inventing in order to avoid them?
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Becausing thinking takes energy and time, which may be put to better use elsewhere. Or to put it more poetically:
"If all of us contemplate the Infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera."
While we always hear quite a lot about the wisdom of thinking everything out ahead of time, I'll just mention that there's a lot to be said for trial-and-error, too. You waste a lot less time thinking carefully throu
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Sure, that might be true if we were, for example, contemplating every possible scenario of extra-terrestrial visitation. What happens if Jesus comes from planet Nebulon riding a purple dragon? Yeah, that probably not worth wondering about. Quantum computing, on the other hand, is something being worked on right now. If there are going to be security flaws fundamental to the technology, it might be worth thinking about.
Your other example, will we overtax our natural resources if we can stave off death f
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Tried and tested for thousands of years - why change a clearly winning concept?
Ooh, tricky... (Score:1)
A layman's take on this article (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I am a self proclaimed computer geek. The main benefit of quantum computers, as I understand it, is an exponential leap in computing power and storage of such systems. If I understand correctly, a qubit can be altered by it's environment and change it's state, thus ruining it's data. I fail to see how this differs from computers today. Run a magnet over a hard drive enough times and good by data. Hard drives fail and lose data all the time, but we have sophisticated data checking algorythms designed to catch this kind of thing so that it doesn't get out of hand. It looks like they are doing something similar here.
I don't understand how one creates a worm with this either. If you know qubit for qubit, what data you want to change, then perhaps, but that requires knowing the qubits ahead of time, doesn't it? Same way with bits today. People create worms due to vulnerabilities within the hardware and software that they can program in. I know of no viruses which rewrite data specifically on their knowledge of ones and zeros.
Could a worm try to attack the physical nature of a quantum computer and run the data by physically attacking it? I don't know in quantum computers, but maybe that's what they are saying. The article is sufficiently arcane that it's difficult to see if it's just an attempt at fear mongering among us lessers, by saying "ooooo quantum computers are vulnerable to worms!" or if there is any real value to this article.
A quantum to english translator is needed
Re:A layman's take on this article (Score:4, Funny)
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What a Quantum Cubit does, as I've read (and it makes sense in my Quantum imaginations), is it can compute ALL POSSIBLE ANSWERS at one time. When I flip this sheet of paper over, it also has some winning lottery numbers -- also made obsolete by Quantum Computers if you believe the hype -- but not really since all numbers are valid answers.
But conventional encryption won't work -- but
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Let me try a simplified explanation using my limited quantum computing knowledge.
There are a bunch of parallel universes and every possible thing that could ever possibly happen is going on in one of them right now. (There's a universe in which you run into a wall and go right through it. In university-level physics you can calculate
Windows Uncertainty Principle (Score:3, Funny)
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- Steve Wozniak
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Quantum Norton Antivirus? (Score:2, Funny)
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But it would have to be very large, and have the ability to slow all the other functions of your computer to less than light speed as well.
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But then how would you know it's not doing anything? It might actually be more useful than NAV.
Somewhat Offtopic (Score:2)
Re:Somewhat Offtopic (Score:5, Informative)
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Future Quantum Nerd Problems (Score:2, Funny)
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My pr0n-collection has wormholed itself to another dimension :(
HAWT! Did you get video?A load of crap ? (Score:2, Funny)
I kinda wondered how somthing can be in two positions at once, then I thought about how the water in a toilet spins in different directions on either side of the earth.
So in a sense, we're basicly looking for a way to get smaller versions of us to flush their toilets when we want them to.
I guess looking at it like that, malware in quantum computing would be the turds in our toilets that clog them up.
We must ask the cats, as they have been observin
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My thanks.
Also:
http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.htm [snopes.com]
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Where this effect does appear is in large air masses, or perfectly still, shallow pans of water tens of meters across.
Hmmmmm.... (Score:1)
Hacking quantum computers ought to be trivial (Score:3, Funny)
How are you going to defend against that?
The future is now? (Score:1)
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quantum networking (Score:1)
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First, to entangle two quantum states at a distance the entanglement must be established in a localized interaction after which the particles representing that state can move to a distance. And second, while entanglement links two states at a distance, it does not in any way permit a mecha
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I feel dumber for having read that (Score:2)
Qubits??? (Score:2)
Qubits?? What, are you stuck in the days of Noah? We live in the modern world now. All calulations are done in feet and inches. Get with the times.
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As usual the slashdot summary is completely wrong. (Score:1)
Quantum computers more vulnerable than normal PCs (Score:2)
In other news, a new study shows that warp drive travel may not be as safe as other means of transportation such as cars or planes.