While the technology world awaits NIST’s latest “post-quantum” cryptography standards this summer, a parallel effort is underway to also develop cryptosystems that are grounded in quantum technology—what are called quantum-key distribution or QKD systems.

As a result, India, China, and a range of technology organizations in the European Union and United States are researching and developing QKD and weighing standards for the nascent cryptography alternative. And the biggest question of all is how or if QKD fits into a robust, reliable, and fully future-proof cryptography system that will ultimately become the global standard for secure digital communications into the 2030s. As in any emerging technology standard, different players are staking claims on different technologies and implementations of those technologies. And many of the big players are pursuing such divergent options because no technology is a clear winner at the moment.

According to Ciel Qi, a research analyst at the New York-based Rhodium Group, there’s one clear leader in QKD research and development—at least for now. “While China likely holds an advantage in QKD-based cryptography due to its early investment and development, others are catching up,” says Qi.

Two different kinds of “quantum secure” tech

At the center of these varied cryptography efforts is the distinction between QKD and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) systems. QKD is based on quantum physics, which holds that entangled qubits can store their shared information so securely that any effort to uncover it is unavoidably detectable. Sending pairs of entangled-photon qubits to both ends of a network provides the basis for physically secure cryptographic keys that can lock down data packets sent across that network.

Typically, quantum cryptography systems are built around photon sources that chirp out entangled photon pairs—where photon A heading down one length of fiber has a polarization that’s perpendicular to the polarization of photon B heading in the other direction. The recipients of these two photons perform separate measurements that enable both recipients to know that they and only they have the shared information transmitted by these photon pairs. (Otherwise, if a third party had intervened and measured one or both photons first, the delicate photon states would have been irreparably altered before reaching the recipients.)

“People can’t predict theoretically that these PQC algorithms won’t be broken one day.” —Doug Finke, Global Quantum Intelligence

This shared bit the two people on opposite ends of the line have in common then becomes a 0 or 1 in a budding secret key that the two recipients build up by sharing more and more entangled photons. Build up enough shared secret 0s and 1s between sender and receiver, and that secret key can be used for a type of strong cryptography, called a one-time pad, that guarantees a message’s safe transmission and faithful receipt by only the intended recipient.

By contrast, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is based not around quantum physics but pure math, in which next-generation cryptographic algorithms are designed to run on conventional computers. And it’s the algorithms’ vast complexity that makes PQC security systems practically uncrackable, even by a quantum computer. So NIST—the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology—is developing gold-standard PQC systems that will undergird tomorrow’s post-quantum networks and communications.

The big problem with the latter approach, says Doug Finke, chief content officer of the New York-based Global Quantum Intelligence, is PQC is only believed (on very, very good but not infallible evidence) to be uncrackable by a fully-grown quantum computer. PQC, in other words, cannot necessarily offer the ironclad “quantum security” that’s promised.

“People can’t predict theoretically that these PQC algorithms won’t be broken one day,” Finke says. “On the other hand, QKD—there are theoretical arguments based on quantum physics that you can’t break a QKD network.”

That said, real-world QKD implementations might still be hackable via side-channel, device-based, and other clever attacks. Plus, QKD also requires direct access to a quantum-grade fiber optics network and sensitive quantum communications tech, neither of which is exactly commonplace today. “For day-to-day stuff, for me to send my credit card information to Amazon on my cellphone,” Finke says, “I’m not going to use QKD.”

China’s early QKD lead dwindling

According to Qi, China may have originally picked QKD as a focal point of their quantum technology development in part because the U.S. was not directing its efforts that way. “[The] strategic focus on QKD may be driven by China’s desire to secure a unique technological advantage, particularly as the U.S. leads in PQC efforts globally,” she says.

In particular, she points to ramped up efforts to use satellite uplinks and downlinks as the basis for free-space Chinese QKD systems. Citing as a source China’s “father of quantum,” Pan Jianwei, Qi says, “To achieve global quantum network coverage, China is currently developing a medium-high orbit quantum satellite, which is expected to be launched around 2026.”

That said, the limiting factor in all QKD systems to date is their ultimate reliance on a single photon to represent each qubit. Not even the most exquisitely-refined lasers and fiber optic lines can’t escape the vulnerability of individual photons.

QKD repeaters, which would blindly replicate a single photon’s quantum state but not leak any distinguishing information about the individual photons passing through—meaning the repeater would not be hackable by eavesdroppers—do not exist today. But, Finke says, such tech is achievable, though at least 5 to 10 years away. “It definitely is early days,” he says.

“While China likely holds an advantage in QKD-based cryptography due to its early investment and development, others are catching up.” —Ciel Qi, Rhodium Group

“In China they do have a 2,000-kilometer network,” Finke says. “But it uses this thing called trusted nodes. I think they have over 30 in the Beijing to Shanghai network. So maybe every 100 km, they have this unit which basically measures the signal... and then regenerates it. But the trusted node you have to locate on an army base or someplace like that. If someone breaks in there, they can hack into the communications.”

Meanwhile, India has been playing catch-up, according to Satyam Priyadarshy, a senior advisor to Global Quantum Intelligence. Priyadarshy says India’s National Quantum Mission includes plans for QKD communications research—aiming ultimately for QKD networks connecting cities over 2,000-km distances, as well as across similarly long-ranging satellite communications networks.

Priyadarshy points both to government QKD research efforts—including at the Indian Space Research Organization—and private enterprise-based R&D, including by the Bengaluru-based cybersecurity firm QuNu Labs. Priyadarshy says that QuNu, for example, has been working on a hub-and-spoke framework named ChaQra for QKD. (Spectrum also sent requests for comment to officials at India’s Department of Telecommunications, which were unanswered as of press time.)

“A hybrid of QKD and PQC is the most likely solution for a quantum safe network.” —Satyam Priyadarshy, Global Quantum Intelligence

In the U.S. and European Union, similar early-stage efforts are also afoot. Contacted by IEEE Spectrum, officials from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI); the International Standards Organization (ISO); the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC); and the IEEE Communications Society confirmed initiatives and working groups that are now working to both promote QKD technologies and emergent standards now taking shape.

“While ETSI is fortunate to have experts in a broad range of relevant topics, there is a lot to do,” says Martin Ward, senior research scientist based at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory in England, and chair of a QKD industry standards group at ETSI.

Multiple sources contacted for this article envisioned a probable future in which PQC will likely be the default standard for most secure communications in a world of pervasive quantum computing. Yet, PQC also cannot avoid its potential Achilles’ heel against increasingly powerful quantum algorithms and machines either. This is where, the sources suggest, QKD could offer the prospect of hybrid secure communications that PQC alone could never provide.

“QKD provides [theoretical] information security, while PQC enables scalab[ility],” Priyadarshy says. “A hybrid of QKD and PQC is the most likely solution for a quantum safe network.” But he added that efforts at investigating hybrid QKD-PQC technologies and standards today are “very limited.”

Then, says Finke, QKD could still have the final say, even in a world where PQC remains preeminent. Developing QKD technology just happens, he points out, to also provide the basis for a future quantum Internet.

“It’s very important to understand that QKD is actually just one use case for a full quantum network,” Finke says.

“There’s a lot of applications, like distributed quantum computing and quantum data centers and quantum sensor networks,” Finke adds. “So even the research that people are doing now in QKD is still very, very helpful because a lot of that same technology can be leveraged for some of these other use cases.”

I believe I am not the only one who has had childhood afternoons spent poring over pirate maps, so you can recognize the feeling that such moments ignited in you, the wanderlust that you yearn to pursue in life. Sea of Thieves may provide just such an adventure (or nostalgic memory reignited), and it could be the case that once started, you will be hooked (pun intended) for a long! Think about the longevity of this adventure game: 12 Seasons already! When I say "hooked for long," it is not just an expression... I really mean it!

Is Sea of Thieves Worth It?

One must consider whether its riches truly meet their mark because the Sea of Thieves is a pleasant and addictive game, however, you cannot avoid asking yourself: is it worth its very high price tag? Also, are there ways to mitigate the price, like getting it for less - think cheap Xbox games on key websites like G2A or Eneba - or something else? Very fast, to leave these questions behind, I can tell you that on Xbox, you can get an Xbox pass for less than $10/month and enjoy many games, including Sea of Thieves. And "yes," it could be found at a better price on the websites mentioned.

From Ship to Shore: Unraveling the Mysteries of Sea of Thieves Islands

Although its graphics might not appeal to everyone - with more cartoony than hyper-realistic depictions - that doesn't matter; what matters is how well they work together: vivid colors, meticulous attention to environment details ranging from tropical island palm trees swaying in the breeze to volcanic vents in Devil's Roar giving off fiery flares combined to form an undeniably stunning world that exudes with its distinct artistic style and captivating moments of breathtaking beauty or hilarious pirate misadventures captured as screenshots before! Never have I taken so many screenshots before in one game that captured such breathtaking moments of breathtaking beauty or hilarious pirate misadventures!

An Insanely Beautiful Piratical Playground

And yet this is only a taste of what lies beyond. Concealed alcoves, perilous shallows, and mysterious isles shrouded in mist make the Sea of Thieves realm, an ever-evolving tableau that never ceases to surprise with its breadth and diversity. Furthermore, weather patterns add another dimension: one moment being caressed by gentle caresses of zephyr wind while moments later caught up in a fierce battle against tempests wreaking havoc: all elements come together to make for an ever-evolving tableau which demands reverence as well as attention as continual adaptation by those living within its waters.

Are You Dreaming of Hoisting the Jolly Roger and Chasing Sunset across Endless Blue?

In conclusion, here's the salty truth: Sea of Thieves can be an amazing solo experience too, even if I would rather recommend it as a multiplayer PvP or PvE video game, offering plenty of solitude with which you can commune with the vastness of the ocean. Even if you buy Xbox adventure games for playing alone, solo sailing offers its poetry and it is a nice departure from many more commercial offers or twitch-shooters that conquered the market lately. This is a different kind of adventure, that develops slowly, but well, and communing directly with nature while learning to read waves, predict storms, and anticipate squalls is part and parcel with becoming a hardened pirate from sea's harsh conditions.

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, 384 pages, $29.99

Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, thinks that taxation is a precondition for freedom, not a threat to it. The current political problem, he argues in The Road to Freedom, is that the right (which for Stiglitz includes libertarians as well as conservatives) rejects the Founding Fathers' idea of no taxation without representation in favor of opposing any taxation at all. This is a problem, he continues, because market failures are more extensive and severe than the "neoliberals"—people like Stiglitz's fellow Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—would admit. For Stiglitz, redistribution and regulation are the real road to freedom.

Much of the book is devoted to criticizing neoliberals, who Stiglitz defines as proponents of "unregulated, unfettered markets." In Stiglitz's view, "a free-market, competitive, neoliberal economy combined with a liberal democracy" isn't enough—for "a stable equilibrium," we need "strong guardrails and a broad societal consensus on the need to curb wealth inequality and money's role in politics."

This book is written as though the regulatory state has not expanded since the end of World War II and as though the welfare state was dismantled in the 1980s. It is written as if liberal democracies' economic policies were all written by someone with the worldview of President Javier Milei of Argentina or the Brazilian MMA fighter Renato Moicano, who at UFC 300 proclaimed that everyone who cares about freedom should be reading the libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises. It is written as though we were still in the Lochner era, when the Supreme Court regularly struck down economic regulations.

But that is not the era we live in. Instead, the state has kept growing because neoliberalism has never reached the level of influence its adherents wanted. A more coherent argument—though still not a good one—would be that the modern state is big but should be bigger.

Nor is this book a good guide to the views of "neoliberals" like Friedman, Hayek, and Mises. No reasonable reading of these writers would suggest that they do not believe in market failures, yet Stiglitz claims that neoliberals think "markets on their own were efficient and stable."

Stiglitz also claims that "Unfettered markets designed along neoliberal principles have effectively robbed [the U.S. and U.K.] of their political freedom." One would expect an economist of Stiglitz's stature to make an effort to support this claim, yet his book offers no evidence for it. The available empirical evidence suggests that Stiglitz has it backward: It is state control of the economy that suppresses democratic freedom. There are other inconvenient empirical studies, including ones showing that the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" works fairly well and that there is no clear evidence that economic freedom leads to more inequality. (There is, however, abundant evidence that economic freedom makes us richer.)

The book does contain many reasonable ideas. Stiglitz is certainly right that the challenges associated with global fisheries, pandemics, and climate change are a fertile opportunity for more economic analysis. And the notion that market failures are both more complex and more common in an increasingly interconnected world should be a starting point for economists and policy makers.

Unfortunately, Stiglitz is too comfortable claiming that the solution to these problems is "regulation," without adding much explanation of how regulation should address such issues. Here he should have engaged more deeply with the insights of another Nobel laureate in economics, Elinor Ostrom. Stiglitz does mention Ostrom's research on the regulation of the commons—that is, of shared resources that anyone can use (and overuse, in the absence of rules governing how people can draw on them). But he sees her work as a defense of "regulation" and a critique of private property.

That wasn't what Ostrom was arguing. Rather than rail against private property, Ostrom argued that it is an empirical question as to whether private property, communal arrangements outside the state, or government control is the most appropriate way to manage the commons. And nothing in Ostrom's work implies a wide-ranging critique of private property. Her work is fully within the same classical liberal tradition that includes Hayek and Friedman.

Public goods, Ostrom argued, are not provided solely by the government. She also stressed the importance of polycentricity—of multiple levels of governance that offer opportunities for citizens and nonprofits to provide public goods, with each level able to cooperate with the others and also to act independently. This is especially useful for thinking about how to address the kinds of complex externalities Stiglitz sees as pervasive. Ostrom even developed a polycentric approach to climate change.

The call for regulation is less fundamental than asking what political arrangements give rise to the most appropriate rules, be they public, private, or communal. Elinor Ostrom and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, highlighted federalism's value as a laboratory of democracy because, like Hayek, they recognized that we do not know how to solve many pressing problems. This book would have been more convincing if instead of devoting so much time to criticizing the neoliberals (and overstating their influence), Stiglitz had spent more time exploring such insights.

Stiglitz's polemics are unlikely to change anyone's mind, but they will probably find an audience among people already predisposed to agree with them. His ideological fellow-travelers will probably like his full-throated defense of "progressive capitalism" (basically contemporary Sweden, with its combination of a generous welfare state, pro-labor policies, and a market economy). But Stiglitz does not explain why the U.S. is not like Sweden, nor how to get to Sweden from where we are now. Nor does Stiglitz note that Sweden, which ranks highly in the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, is rather open to policies promoted by neoliberals.

If you're interested in understanding market liberalism, there are better recent books to read, such as Peter Boettke's The Struggle for a Better World or Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden's Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich, each of which explains what classical liberals mean by freedom. If you are tempted to accept the notion that neoliberals lack a moral sense, you would especially benefit from Humanomics—by Bart Wilson and another Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith—which articulates the rich moral framework of Adam Smith's tradition. And if you want a more compelling empirical critique of capitalism, Daniel Bromley's Possessive Individualism explains how modern capitalism differs from the capitalism of even half a century ago, let alone Adam Smith's time.

But even our current, heavily regulated variety of capitalism is better than countless real-world alternatives. After all, if the situation in the U.S. were as bad as Stiglitz suggests, one would not expect so many people to want to move here. The border "crisis," which is really a problem with excessive regulation, suggests that the U.S. has pretty good institutions. Or at the very least, that people think those institutions are better than what they are leaving. And what they are leaving is less economic and political freedom.

The post Stiglitz's <i>The Road to Freedom</i> Under Scrutiny appeared first on Reason.com.

Vietnam has recently taken action to block access to the popular PC gaming platform Steam, according to reports from various gaming news outlets. The move ...

The post Steam banned in Vietnam appeared first on Gizchina.com.

For a game I need to split a number into random parts, where the parts have lower and upper limits. (a precheck will ensure that a split is possible)

Example: Number:10, Parts:5, MinSize:1, MaxSize:3
Split(10,5,1,3) => 3,3,2,1,1
Split(10,5,1,3) => 1,2.5,3,1.5,2

I started with:

Foreach Part => Rand(MinSize,MaxSize)
Then I scale all the parts, so that the sum is equal to the number.
BUT, the simple scaling will possibly set parts outside the limits.

Is there a simple implementation with C#?

(For simplicity, the number could be 1 and the limits respectively smaller)
The result of 10,5,1,3 could be scaled from 1,5,0.1,0.3

Greetings, Mech

Securing physical copies of a number of Disney classics is about to get a lot harder. Disney has announced today that after 23 years of service, it will be shuttering the Disney Movie Club later this year. Disney Movie Club is a subscription service for diehard fans that, since 2001, has provided an avenue for them to…

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