The National Security Agency(NSA) is building a quantum computer that breaks into the encryption that keeps messages secure and hopes to harness the special qualities of quantum computers to speed up its code-cracking efforts.
It is believed that the NSA has spent about $80m on the project but it has yet to produce a working machine.
The NSA expects the system when done to break encryption systems used online and by foreign governments to keep official messages secure.
It is being developed under a research programme called Penetrating Hard Targets and is believed to be conducted out of a lab in Maryland.
Current computers attempt to crack encryption are limited to generating possible keys to unscramble data one at a time. Using big computers can speed this up but the huge numbers used as keys to lock away data limits the usefulness of this approach.
A quantum computers exploit properties of matter that, under certain conditions, mean the machine can carry out lots and lots of calculations simultaneously. This makes it practical to try all the possible keys protecting a particular message or stream of data.
The hard part of creating a working quantum computer is keeping enough of its constituent computational elements, called qubits, stable so they can interact and be put to useful work.
Documents leaked to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden suggest the agency’s researchers are having some success developing the basic building blocks for the machine.
Source: BBC
This looks like the spherical concave Earth with space our whole universe fitting inside concave Earth, inside a celestial sphere, inverted. Are the rings around it the layers of the glass sky and amphibious ocean? Looks like it. Oh I think they know.