Yes, but it exists because it was deemed better to be cautious and implement PQC despite the uncertainty and different points of view around the time scale to have cryptographically relevant quantum computers (or, from a different point of view, precisely due to the uncertainties). Their comment was in the wrong tone, but the doubts are there. BTW, PQC can be interesting to learn regardless of the discussion around quantum computers.
"will we have a CRQC soon" is the subject of much debate but "will we have a CRQC ever" is pretty uncontroversially a possibility, and so it is worth defending against harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks in the present - which is why X25519MLKEM768 is widely deployed already.
However, the time needed to get one plays a crucial role. Governments need to protect some piece of data for a very long time, but common people are generally fine with keeping something secret for their lives' duration. I don't care if someone decrypts my laptop's SSD after I'm dead.
Some replies complain about the moderator not answering the main question. While this is a valid complaint, it is also likely that they don't know the answer as well. Now, the best reply would be to openly say that they don't have visibility into upper management's decisions. But, at the same time, I think it's possible that the way they're replying has to do with some internal guidelines on how to handle this sort of questions.
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
The point is that the lockbox is the TPM that, on paper, is supposed to be unbreakable. In practice, sometimes it can still be broken with physical attacks (like side channel analysis or fault injection, or even simply snooping the communication between the TPM and the rest of the system with a logic level analyzer), despite that it should be designed to be hard to break even with such attacks.
If the TPM is properly designed and manufactured, and the software relying on it is again properly designed and implemented, then it would be perfectly secure. The problem is more the difference between the theory and the real world; the flimsy lockbox analogy doesn't hold.
My only doubt about YellowKey is, does it require having access to an already unlocked machine (i.e., the user is logged in) to copy the required files?
Yes, but my question was where the files on the thumb drive are coming from. At first, my understanding was that you needed to get them from the victim's machine. But, after watching a LowLevel video on YouTube, it seems those are universal files that you can get from the exploit's repo.
Did Einstein ever say that QM is non local, and therefore it is wrong? The discussions around this topic seem to imply this, but I don't know if this happened. Also, AFAIK what Einstein really didn't like, was the idea that, at a fundamentals level, our reality isn't deterministic. This is at odds with our everyday experience, but it seems to have been confirmed by experiments. So maybe focusing on what their thoughts about locality were could be missing the forest for the tree.
I added the link to Veritasium. They discuss what Einstein said, his exact words. They even show books where his words were printed. Though in German ofc.
Veritasium tries to uncover all the story of the myth of old demented Einstein who was unable to accept QM. And it seems to be a very unfair myth. They say "the history is written by victors" (in this case by Bohr), and I tend to agree.
> Did Einstein ever say that QM is non local, and therefore it is wrong?
Well, kinda, but not exactly. He said that Copenhagen interpretation of QM is non-local. Not QM itself, Veritasium cites some Einstein's letter to Bohr where Einstein explicitly accepts the math of QM, because it works, but opposes "spooky action at distance". Should we interpret it as Einstein claimed that QM is wrong? I'm not entirely sure, he hoped that if they fixed that non-locality thing of QM, they will be able to bridge QM and GR. (Probably, his previous experience of fixing non-locality of Newton's gravity led to this prediction.)
You see, Einstein had one wrong presumption. He thought that if QM non-local then it would lead to contradictions. But it turned out that it doesn't lead to contradictions: a measurement and a wave-function collapse lead to non-local consequences, but they cannot be used to transfer information. So no contradictions. Despite this wrong presumption, I didn't hear Einstein saying QM is wrong, he was pretty careful about what he said, and you'll probably can't catch him on a single wrong claim. He pointed to non-locality and said "it smells". He proposed hidden variables as an alternative removing the smell. It is all. None of these claims were wrong.
I believe he was seeking some thought experiment that can show contradictions, but he failed. But he had found experiments that can show non-locality without any doubt.
> maybe focusing on what their thoughts about locality were could be missing the forest for the tree.
I don't think so. It fits perfectly. Einstein spent ~10 years fighting gravity, mostly due to the reason of non-locality of Newton's gravity. Non-local gravity couldn't work with relativity, it leads to contradictions. Einstein fought non-locality for 10 years, and it fits perfectly that he noticed non-locality in quantum-mechanics instantly, when others didn't (it was even not because Einstein was a genius, he was just primed to non-locality and highly sensitive to it). It fits perfectly that Einstein was very concerned by it and sought ways around it.
For example he proposed hidden variables as a way around it. Just think about it: his hidden variables didn't try to make quantum mechanics into a deterministic theory, values of hidden variables meant to be non-deterministic. Eistein tried to make QM local, by fixing hidden variables way before "wave-function collapse".
At the same time your claim that Einstein was against non-deterministic nature of QM, doesn't fit facts, AND it fits perfectly with people not really understanding what Einstein think is wrong with QM. Bohr had written an obscurantist's answer to EPR paper, in which he claimed that he won the dispute, but I'm not sure there was at least one person who really understood how. This smog of war naturally leads to people hypothesizing and coalescing to some easily understandable hypothesis. And hypotheses of Einstein's aversion to non-determinism is an easily understandable hypothesis.
So my (probabilistic) judgement is: the story told by Veritasium is highly probable. It relies on some sample set of facts. The sample can be non-representative, but the whole story fits in a way that I don't believe anyone can fit artificially, even if they tried really hard.
According to Sabine Hossefelder, there's no scientific basis to expect that a theory of everything exists (if I remember correctly this blog post) [1]. But I also have to say that, while I do find interesting what she talks about and I agree with her about some problems in academia she often complains about, for this very reason some other physicists don't like her and say she's wrong. But my understanding is that she still gets the Physics and Math parts right, it is her complaints about academia that some academics strongly disagree with.
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