Daily Archives: August 6, 2022

Defence analyst Pravin Sawhneys new book begins with an imagined cyberattack on India by China – Scroll.in

Posted: August 6, 2022 at 7:51 pm

Prime Ministers Office, New Delhi, 22 February 2024

...Whats the problem? the prime minister rasps.

Sir, this looks like a formidable cyberattack. Even our secure network has been breached, the NSA says. We are unable to contact anyone.

The prime minister of Indias office has turned into an island.

In a few minutes it becomes clear that the PMO is not the only one to fall off the internet highway. The ministries of defence, home, finance, as well as the service headquarters of the armed forces have all gone offline. The Government of India has been thrown backwards by more than three decades. Even the phone lines are not working.

A sense of foreboding descends on the room. The prime minister walks back to his office, followed by the NSA. The principal secretary is tasked with physically summoning the members of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), the chief of defence staff (CDS), and the three service chiefs for an immediate meeting.

Unlikely, replies the NSA. Beads of perspiration appear on his forehead.

China?

Thats most likely.

China had been issuing warnings to India since the previous year when the prime minister had visited Bum La in Arunachal Pradesh and addressed the troops in Tawang. China had termed this a grave provocation. Consequently, it increased military activity in its Western Theatre Command (WTC) close to the border with India. According to the intelligence reports that the NSA has been receiving over the last few months, the activity appeared to be more than the regular exercises that the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) regularly conducts.

Convoys of all kinds of trucks are frequently spotted moving stores, ammunition, and fuel on the multiple tar roads heading towards Lhasa (the headquarters of Tibet Military Command), and sometimes on the arterial roads linking up to the LAC1. Since 2020, the PLA has built robust and technologically advanced underground facilities (UGFs) to protect all aspects of its military forces, including command and control, logistics, ammunition, and missile systems.

Started around 2012, the UGF building programme in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) had been upgraded and expanded. The deeply buried UGFs were traditionally meant to protect military assets from the effects of penetrating conventional munitions and nuclear strikes.

According to intelligence reports, after the 2020 Ladakh face-off, the PLA deployed electronic and cyber warfare units in TAR. Dual-use airports were upgraded for combat jet and drone flights. Huge communication towers had been set up. Blast pens or hardened shelters for combat aircraft had been built. Numerous air defence and missile sites had been dug. But India had been ignoring these provocations.

Despite all the threats, the prime minister and the NSA were convinced that China would not enter all-out war with India and imperil its own economic growth. This view was also supported by the military establishment led by the CDS. Even in 2024, the Indian military held the view it had formulated back in 2009 that China would not want to wage a war with India because a stalemate on ground would be viewed as defeat.

And stalemate it would be, they believed, because the Indian military of 2024 was not the same as 1962. It was prepared to fight and was battle hardened by decades of fighting terrorism on the Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan. The Indian Air Force, with some 250-300 combat aircraft from all bases located at much lower altitudes, had many advantages over the PLA Air Force (PLAAF). It would make sure that it sent back thousands of body bags of PLA soldiers, thereby destroying Chinas reputation as a world power.

But was the Chinese military of 2024 the same as the one in 1962? This was an uncomfortable question with an unsavoury answer. Since the prime minister was not in the habit of listening to unpleasant answers, nobody raised this question. Perhaps nobody knew that this was a question that needed to be asked.

Despite ongoing studies on China, the Indian military, even in 2024, was oblivious of the war China had been preparing for. Traditionally, the Indian military believed that China was at least a decade ahead of Indian capabilities. Sanguine in this assessment, it was clueless about the rapid transformation that had been taking place in the neighbourhood.

But if China does not intend to go to war with India, why would it mount such a formidable cyberattack on the seat of the government?

Looking through his notes based on a recent intelligence report, the NSA runs the prime minister through what he knows about the PLAs presence in TAR. The combat support forces (Rocket Force, Strategic Support Force, and Joint Logistics Support Force) in the WTC have been conducting training with combat units to deploy and manoeuvre with them. The reported PLA convoys into TAR include large numbers of unmanned vehicles combat as well as reconnaissance. One report mentions sighting thousands of humanoid robots in military buses and trains to Lhasa.

Humanoid robots?

They are likely to be used for combat support like maintenance, readying of ammunition, supplies, fuel and so on, the NSA says in a slightly dismissive tone.

Difficult to say. But its unlikely that a phishing attack would disrupt our networks. This seems to be something else.

By this time, the CCS has assembled in the conference room. Breaking protocol, the chief of air staff (CAS) blurts out, This is not an ordinary cyberattack. The malware that has attacked us is extremely sophisticated. It has breached all our firewalls. Our entire communication network has collapsed. We have been rendered blind and deaf.

A cold frisson runs through the conference room. The army and the navy chiefs have similar reports to share. The navy chief is particularly worried. The navy has lost contact with the INS Vikrant carrier battle group that includes two destroyers, four frigates, three submarines, fifteen fighters, eight helicopters, two long-range maritime patrol aircraft, and a number of smaller vessels.

Seeing the prime ministers quizzical look, the NSA explains stoically, Sir, if we have lost contact with them, it means they have also lost contact with ground control. This can lead to accidents.

The CAS interrupts. Its a very serious situation. We have deployed six aircraft for this exercise. All communications with them have snapped.

Glancing at the NSA, he adds, In Ladakh, the PLA has also deployed a large number of unmanned and autonomous systems, including combat systems. If they get up to some mischief using machines, we wont get to know. Of course, our troops are trained and prepared for all eventualities. But communication with headquarters is critical.

Despite the apparent calm in the room, the panic was palpable. The COASs remark was foreboding, but it also held a clue to the motive for the cyberattack. The principal secretary was told to summon the director of National Critical Information Infrastructures Protection Centre (NCIIPC) that works under the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), the head of the Defence Cyber Agency under the Integrated Defence Headquarters, and the National Cyber Security Coordinator who works directly under the PMO.

The reports are worse than expected.

Sir, it doesnt look like a mere cyberattack. The internet in peninsular India has stopped working. Most DRDO laboratories, ISRO, and the DPSUs have no internet. We dont know yet how much of the infrastructure has been affected, the NSA says, running his hand over his forehead.

Its a major cyberattack, the prime minister says.

After a moments silence, the NSA adds, It looks like some of our submarine cables that connect us to the global internet have been tampered with. Maybe they have been cut.

But thats an act of war, the prime minister says to the now silent room.

The conference room turns into an impromptu war room.

I need updates every half hour, the prime minister declares and storms out.

Excerpted with permission from The Last War: How AI Will Shape Indias Final Showdown with China, Pravin Sawhney, Aleph Book Company.

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Defence analyst Pravin Sawhneys new book begins with an imagined cyberattack on India by China - Scroll.in

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What is a Libertarian? Part I: The Libertarian Movement – 1819 News

Posted: at 7:50 pm

Americas third-largest party, the Libertarian Party (LP), will be on the ballot in Alabama in Novembers election. The Libertarian Partys website lists over 60 candidates running for positions across the state.

But what does the word libertarian mean?

Libertarianism is a political philosophy. It is not inherently connected to the Libertarian Party. Some self-professed Libertarians are Republicans. Others do not engage in the political system at all.

Wikipedia defines libertarianism simply as a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value.

According to Libertarianism.org, Libertarians believe that, in politics, liberty is the most important value. Almost everyone wants freedom for themselves, but a libertarian also seeks to protect and expand the freedom of others.

1819 News asked self-professed libertarians in Alabama what they believe a Libertarian is.

I would define a Libertarian as anybody that wants to limit government from what it currently is, and that could mean somebody that wants more states rights or rights at the municipal level or somebody that wants to cut back greatly in what the federal government does, said Joey Clark.

Clark is the host of News and Views on Talk 93.1. He describes himself as a Libertarian.

Then you would get to the more hardcore answer that a Libertarian is somebody who believes that liberty is the most important value in politics, Clark said. Liberty is something we must use as a cornerstone for building whatever we call a free society. That could mean different things to different people, and the cultural divide certainly comes up, but I would put anybody who wants to limit the government and decentralize power in the Libertarian camp.

Jonathan Realz is a Libertarian Party candidate running for Congress in Alabamas Second Congressional District. Realz said that a Libertarian is somebody that believes that the individual owns themselves.

Your rights do not come from a government, Realz said. Sure, a government can help you secure your rights, but at the end of the day, your rights come from humanity, and the government does not have or should not have the power to infringe on your rights.

Gavin Goodman is the chair of the Libertarian Party of Alabama.

Libertarianism is the belief in individual liberty and not forcing ones views on others, Goodman said.

Where does libertarianism come from?

What it means to be human is to be anarchic, Clark said. It doesnt mean everybody has to be an anarchist and railing against authority, the government or the church, but I think everybody has an inherent freedom and if you think back to those early times that probably arent documented, people are fundamentally doing what they think they need to do.

Clark said libertarianism in the West comes out of a fusion of the best of the Greek and the best of the Judeo-Christian tradition that at least recognizes the sovereign individual.

Though libertarianism in the United States is a distinct movement, its roots lie in classical philosophy and Natural Law Theory.

The Ten Commandments, both in Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21, say Thou shalt not murder and Thou shalt not steal.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to hold that what is just by nature is not always equivalent to what is just by law.

St. Augustine of Hippo, a late 4th and early 5th-century bishop and theologian, is famous for saying, an unjust law is no law at all.

This laid the groundwork for medieval Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas to formulate a complete theory of Natural Law in the 13th century, which suggested that man is bound to abide by objective moral principles before he is bound to abide by the laws of manmade government.

Though not all Libertarians arrive at libertarianism through Natural Law, and Natural Law can be taken in many different ways, the theory influenced many modern libertarian thinkers such as Rothbard and Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Both Aristotle and Aquinas were also influential to Ayn Rand, who is largely considered an important figure in the modern libertarian movement.

According to The Objective Standard, a website dedicated to Rands philosophy, Rand recommended her followers read only three philosophers, which she called the three As. They were Aristotle, Aquinas and Ayn Rand.

Rand included Aquinas despite her staunch commitment to atheism.

Some say America was founded on Libertarian principles, and the War for Independence was a Libertarian political movement.

In the United States, I think it [libertarianism] really blossomed, Clark said. It was already there. Elements of it were in Greece, elements of it in Rome and there are even elements of it throughout the so-called Dark Ages and medieval Europe and the British experience and the British common law, but I think libertarianism really takes its footing in the world stage in the American Revolution.

... In the Constitution we have, there is throughout, especially in the Bill of Rights, this sense of the sovereign individual who is made in the image and likeness of God."

[The founding fathers] struggled with giving as many Americans as much liberty as possible, Goodman said. And then the balance of what is the role of the government in protecting liberty as well as defending the vital functions of government.

Libertarian principles have kind of always been an underlying basis for the United States, Realz said. Thats what this country was founded on. It was supposed to be a limited government, not a lot of interaction in your personal life. We fought an entire war over way fewer taxes than what we have now, but here we are, for some reason, very very far away from what this country was founded on.

One of the earliest figures in the modern libertarian movement was economist Ludwig von Mises. Mises fled from Nazi-occupied Austria to the United States in 1940 and brought with him an economic tradition known as the Austrian school.

The Austrian school of economics originated in Vienna, Austria, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with Carl Menger and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. It relies on a theoretical methodology known as praxiology, which is opposed to mainstream schools of economics that rely on purely empirical methods.

Mises used Austrian economics to argue that government intervention in the economy impedes the accuracy of profit and loss measurements, which entrepreneurs use as signals to direct resources toward their most efficient uses.

Mises believed in classical liberalism, which emphasizes limited government, economic and political freedom and self-determination.

SEE ALSO: Mises Institute welcomes students to Auburn for Mises University, Institute marks 40 years

[Mises] was such a great man, such an important figure, said Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute in Auburn.

Rockwell was Misess publisher at Arlington Publishing and was significantly influenced by his political and economic theories.

Rand, too, fled an authoritarian government. She left the Soviet Union as a girl after the Bolshevik revolution reduced her family to poverty. She published her first novel, We the Living, in 1936, a novella, Anthem, in 1937 and The Fountainhead in 1942.

In 1957, Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, an over 500,000-word dystopian novel about wealthy capitalists escaping socialist bureaucrats and academics to form a society of their own.

Rand believed that free-market capitalism was not only the most efficient economic system but the only moral one as opposed to socialism, communism and cronyism. This was one of the core tenets of her philosophy, which she called objectivism.

Rand was a minarchist, meaning she believed in a night-watchman state, a term popularized by another influential Libertarian figure, Robert Nozick. A night-watchmen state is limited to essential functions such as police and courts.

Though Rand espoused similar beliefs and was influential in the movement's growth, she did not consider herself a Libertarian. In 1971, she referred to Libertarians as hippies of the right and, in later years, was highly critical of the Libertarian Party.

The Austrian school is not the only economic tradition to influence the larger Libertarian movement. Nobel Prize-winning Chicago school economist Milton Friedman brought a Libertarian message to the masses through his books Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose.

The Chicago school is a more mainstream classification of economic thought, though it still largely rejects the economics of John Maynard Keynes, who influenced many of the spendthrift welfare programs in the West during and after the Great Depression.

Free to Choose, which Friedman co-wrote with his wife, Rose, was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980. They produced a 10-part television series of the same name that was broadcasted by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) that year.

Free to Choose emphasized the interdependent relationship between political and economic freedom and argued that the free market serves all people in society for the better.

At the University of Chicago, Friedman was the teacher of other influential Libertarian thinkers, including Thomas Sowell. An economist, political commentator and sociologist, Sowell is the author of over 45 books, including Basic Economics.

Mises, Rand, Friedman and Sowell were all inspirations to conservative-libertarian economist and commentator Walter E. Williams, according to his autobiography.

An acolyte of Mises, Rothbard furthered the development of the Austrian school of economics in the United States.

Rothbard coined the term anarcho-capitalism to describe a political philosophy that seeks to abolish involuntary central governments in favor of stateless societies run by private property rules.

In his popular essay, Anatomy of the State, Rothbard argues that the phrase we are the government is incorrect because majority rule always means the minority is dominated. The minority, then, cant accurately say that they are the government, even in a democracy. He suggests that the State, i.e., any institution which imposes a monopoly on violence over a given territory, is rooted in predation.

Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State, Rothbard wrote. The State has never been created by a social contract; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.

In 1982, Rothbard helped Rockwell start the Mises Institue, which came to Alabama and is now across the street from Auburn University on West Magnolia Avenue.

Rothbard worked with the left-wing anti-war movement in the mid-20th century but became more friendly to the right before his death in 1995.

Rothbard began calling himself a paleolibertarian in 1989 and supported paleoconservative candidate Pat Buchanan for president in 1992. Paleolibertarains are typically culturally conservative libertarians who seek to reduce the power of the State through right-wing populism.

Murray, of course, was extremely important, Rockwell said. ...He was so brilliant, so funny, so charming. What a great man to work with Ill say, I miss him every day As far as I could tell, he knew everything.

Not all of these figures got along, however. Though Rothbard praised Atlas Shrugged after its publication, he conflicted with Rands circle over his defense of libertarian anarchism, among other disagreements. He later satirized Rand in an unpublished play, Mozart Was Red and an essay titled The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.

[Rand] liked Murray at first, then she felt that he was being a crazy guy and a bad person because his wife was Christian, Rockwell said.

Rothbard and Friedman maintained a friendly relationship until the early 1960s. Friedman recommended Rothbard for a post at the University of Chicago in 1956 but later clashed with Rothbard over his book, Americas Great Depression. Rothbard wrote an essay in 1971 titled Milton Friedman Unraveled, describing Friedman as the Establishments Court Libertarian.

Ron Paul ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and 2012. Though he failed to receive the Republican nomination twice, Pauls campaign and his participation in the GOP debates sparked a grassroots movement that introduced millennials to libertarianism.

The movement is often referred to as the Ron Paul Revolution.

Chances are, any young libertarian you meet today will tell you that their chief influence in becoming a libertarian was Ron Paul, Dan Sanchez wrote in the Mises Wire in 2012. Ron Paul has swelled the ranks of the liberty movement to a greater extent than perhaps any other individual in history. If that's not success, I don't know what is.

Paul served as a U.S. Representative from Texas from 1976 to 1977, 1979 to 1985 and from 1997 to 2013. He is a self-described constitutionalist and was an outspoken critic throughout his political career of the Federal Reserve, the USA PATRIOT Act, the war on drugs and the war on terror.

Today, Paul lives in Lake Jackson, Texas, where he maintains The Ron Paul Liberty Report podcast with co-host Daniel McAdams. His son, Rand, has been serving as a U.S. Senator from Kentucky since 2011 as a Republican.

[Paul] is so important, Rockwell said. ... He started reading Austrian economics when he was in medical school He ran three times for president, each time bringing a [much] more massive group of people on his side. Hes a great speaker. Hes a very great man.

The LP first convened in August 1971 at the home of David F. Nolan in Westminster, Colorado. It was officially created that December in Colorado Springs. The party founders were inspired by Rothbards writings and formed in part due to concerns about President Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War and the end of the gold standard.

Goodman said the first motto of the LP was There aint no such thing as a free lunch or TANSTAAFL, which comes from Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a science fiction novel about a libertarian rebellion on the moon.

The LPs first presidential candidate was John Hospers. Hospers was once a friend of Rand, but she broke ties with him after he criticized her epistemological beliefs.

According to Rockwell, Rothbard initially opposed the LP, but eventually joined.

Rothbard was active in the LP in the 70s and 80s but left in 1989 after allying with Rockwell and Paul for Pauls failed 1988 run for president as a Libertarian.

Today, the LP has 320 Libertarians holding elected office nationwide, according to its website. It remains the third largest political party in the United States by voter registration.

In 2020, Justin Amash became the first and only Libertarian candidate in U.S. Congress after he left the Republican Party in the middle of his term. He did not run for reelection in 2021.

To connect with the author of this story, or to comment, email will.blakely@1819news.com or find him on Twitter and Facebook.

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Heather Nepa: A Desire to be a Difference-Maker – UNLV NewsCenter

Posted: at 7:50 pm

With four kids, one husband, and multiple pets, including 17 fish all named Dominic (it was 18, but one of the Dominics swam on to fishy heaven), and a full-time job, Heather Nepa is one busy woman.

But this UNLV alumna and first-place recipient of the Presidents Classified Employee of the Year Award for 2022 took time to tell us about her UNLV career, her higher education experience, and her life.

I am an admin III in anthropology. Mostly my job is student-focused, building the schedule, helping the grad coordinator with applications, and handling paperwork. We have faculty retiring and, as a result, doing searches online for new faculty was a big task this year. Facilitating all of that was a lot of work, but it was a great experience.

Ive been at UNLV since 2013. I originally was in the history department. I transferred to anthropology in 2019.

My dad, Jim Ratigan, is a grad of UNLV (78 BS Business Administration). He was heavily involved in the Alumni Association. UNLV just has kind of been in my blood since the beginning. I remember being 8 and my dad taking me to all the home basketball games. That was the year they won the national championship. I will be a diehard Runnin Rebels fan until the end of my days.

When I was graduating from Bonanza High School, my dad told me I had three choices for college UNLV, UNLV, and UNLV.

I graduated from UNLV in 2004 with a BA in history. Now I am using the grant-in-aid benefit to get another degree. Fingers crossed, I will graduate with an Executive MBA in December 2023.

When I was looking to rejoin the workforce, I thought working at UNLV would be perfect. Ive really found that I have a passion for helping other students. I think everybody deserves to have a good college experience.

I am so honored and so shocked. I burst into tears when they said my name. I am so thankful that I got recognized for doing something that I love. I was just doing my job and doing what I think is the right thing. Its mind-blowing. I dont think I really have realized it yet.

The first tip would be: Try to grow your network as big as possible. Meet people. Give them a call. That has been one of the most valuable tools in my toolkit.

These people who work in other departments are so valuable. Those connections are what will help you be successful.

That was working for my Uncle Kenny who had a catering company. He used to take his food truck out to the Speedway. This was before food trucks were a big deal.

I was like 13. People would purposely try to give me big bills, hoping I would make a mistake, but I learned how to count back money. I also learned customer service and how to handle high-pressure situations.

I love to read. I love to spend time with my kids. My husband, Fred, and I have four children: Sienna, 15. Sean, 13, Dominic 6, and Donovan, 4. Theres a lot of baseball in my life. I love animals, all animals. We have two dogs, two tortoises, and a whole tankful of fish. Dominic wanted the fish. He got about 18 fish and he decided he wanted to name them all Dominic, so we have Dominic 1, Dominic 2

At work I come off as very extroverted, but I am a homebody. I love my friends and family, but I very much need my own Heather time to kind of recharge.

I really, really want to make a difference. I would love to be a difference-maker at UNLV I would love to be a voice for undergraduates and graduate students and get things put into place. If not at UNLV, I just would like to be a difference-maker in general. And hopefully be retired.

Dunkin Donuts coffee. I have my Dunkin Donuts coffee every morning. I have narrowed myself down to two cups a day.

Im very into Westworld, but that is not everybodys cup of tea.

Probably one of the most influential books I have ever read is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It completely changed my life and got me to think in different ways.

Because I have food allergies I would go for a thick slice of thick-crust pizza with all the cheese, not the gluten-free ones I have to have now, with a Diet Coke. If its my last meal, I am going to go for it.

I think it was a day spent with (history professor) Dr. (Elizabeth) Nelson. She had set up an old-school baseball game with rules from the 1800s. The rules werent close to the same as they are today. It was awesome to watch her and some of the history grad students play. That was a fun, great day.

Esther Williams, office manager and AA IV, and Daniel Benyshek, professor and chair, anthropology department:

Heather is a proud and engaged UNLV Rebel alumna and employee, whose professionalism, exceptional quality of work, cheerful collegiality, and can-do initiative and helpfulness, have made her a cherished employee to anthropology faculty, staff, and students alike. Heathers commitment to the department its mission and its people is especially evident in her desire to help others, be they faculty, staff, or students.

As several department faculty and staff have dealt with serious medical issues over the last several years, Heather was always the first to volunteer to assist with or complete work tasks, provide transportation, or deliver food to those in need. While not required, she has also volunteered to sit on various department committees as a non-voting member, if only to improve the work flow and efficiency of the committees efforts whether that is by helping shepherd extensive curriculum changes through the college and university approval process, or helping faculty navigate complex classroom technology issues for hybrid department colloquia. Suffice it to say, Heather always goes the extra mile.

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Transhumanists want to upload their minds to a computer. They really won’t like the result – Big Think

Posted: at 7:48 pm

If you are reading these words, your brain is alive and well, stored within the protective confines of your skull where it will reside for the remainder of your life. I feel the need to point this out because there is a small but vocal population of self-proclaimed transhumanists who believe that within their lifetimes, technological advances will enable them to upload their minds into computer systems, thereby allowing them to escape the limitations of their biology and effectively live forever.

These transhumanists are wrong.

To be fair, not all transhumanists believe in mind uploading as a pathway to immortality, but theres enough chatter about the concept within that community that excitement has spilled out into the general public so much so, that Amazon has a comedic TV series based on the premise called Upload. These may be fun stories, but the notion that a single biological human will ever extend their life by uploading their mind into a computer system is pure fiction.

The concept of mind uploading is rooted in the very reasonable premise that the human brain, like any system that obeys the laws of physics, can be modeled in software if you devote sufficient computing power to the problem. To be clear, were not talking about modeling human brains in the abstract, but modeling very specific brains your brain, my brain, your uncle Herberts brain each one represented in such extreme detail that every single neuron is accurately simulated, including all the complex connections among them.

It is an understatement to say that modeling a unique, individual human brain is a non-trivial task.

There are over 85 billion neurons in your head, each with thousands of links to other neurons. In total, there are about 100 trillion connections, which is unfathomably large a thousand times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Its those trillions of connections that make you who you are your personality, your memories, your fears, your skills, your peculiarities. Your mind is encoded in those 100 trillion connections, and so to accurately reproduce your mind in software, a system would need to precisely simulate the vast majority of those connections down to the most subtle interactions.

Obviously, that level of modeling will not be done by hand. People who believe in mind uploading envision an automated scanning process, likely using some kind of supercharged MRI machine, that captures the biology down to resolutions that approach the molecular level. They then envision the use of intelligent software to turn that scan into a simulation of each unique brain cell and its thousands of connections to other cells.

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That is an extremely challenging task, but I cannot deny that it is theoretically feasible. If it ever happens, it is not going to happen in the next 20 years, but much, much further out. And with additional time and resources, it also is not crazy to think that large numbers of simulated minds could co-exist inside of a rich and detailed simulation of physical reality. Still, the notion that this process will offer anyone reading this article a pathway to immortality is utterly absurd.

As I stated above, the idea that a single biological human will ever extend their life by uploading their minds is pure fiction. The two key words in that sentence are their life. While it is theoretically possible with sufficient technological advances to copy and reproduce the precise form and function of a unique human brain within a simulation, the original human would still exist in their biological body, their brain still housed within their skull. What would exist in the computer would be a copy a digital doppelgnger.

In other words, you would not feel like you suddenly transported yourself into a computer. In fact, you would not feel anything at all. The brain copying process could have happened without your knowledge, while you were asleep or sedated, and you would never have the slightest inkling that a reproduction of your mind existed within a simulation. And if you found yourself crossing a busy street with a car racing toward you you would jump out of the way, because you would not be immortal.

But what about that version of you within a simulation?

You could think of it as a digital clone or identical twin, but it would not be you. It would be a copy of you, including all your memories up to the moment your brain was scanned. But from that instant on, it would generate its own memories. It might be interacting with other simulated minds in a simulated world, learning new things and having new experiences. Or maybe it interacts with the physical world through robotic interfaces. At the same time, the biological you would be generating new memories and having new experiences.

In other words, it would only be identical for an instant, and then you and the copy would both diverge in different directions. Your skills would diverge. Your knowledge would diverge. Your personalities would diverge. After a few years, there would be substantial differences. Your copy might become deeply religious while you are agnostic. Your copy might become an environmentalist while you are an oil executive. You and the copy would retain similar personalities, but you would be different people.

Yes, the copy of you would be a person but a different person. Thats a critical point, because that copy of you would need to have its own identity and its own rights that have nothing to do with you. After all, that person would feel just as real inside their digital mind as you feel within your biological mind. Certainly, that person should not be your slave, required to take on tasks that you are too busy to do during your biological life. Such exploitation would be immoral.

After all, the copy would feel just like you feel fully entitled to own its own property and earn its own wages and make its own decisions. In fact, you and the copy would likely have a dispute as to who gets to use your name, as you would both feel like you had used it your entire life. If I made a copy of myself, it would wake up and fully believe it was Louis Barry Rosenberg, a lifelong technologist in the fields of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. If it was able to interact with the real world through digital or robotic means, it would believe it had every right to use the name Louis Barry Rosenberg in the physical world. And it certainly would not feel subservient to the biological version.

In other words, creating a digital copy through mind uploading has nothing to do with allowing you to live forever. Instead, it would just create a competitor who has identical skills and capabilities and memories to the biological version, and who feels equally justified to be the owner of your identity. And yes, the copy would feel equally justified to be married to your spouse and parent to your children.

In other words, mind uploading is not a path to immortality. It is a path for creating another you who immediately will feel like they are equally justified owners of everything you possess and everything you have accomplished. And they would react exactly the way you would react if you woke up one day and were told: Sorry, but all those memories of your life arent really yours but copies, so your spouse is not really your spouse, your kids are not really your kids, and your job is not really your job.

Is this really what anyone would want to subject a copy of yourself to?

Back in 2008, I wrote a graphic novel called Upgrade that explores the absurdity of mind uploading. It takes place in the 2040s in a future world where everyone spends the vast majority of their lives in the Metaverse, logging in the moment they wake up and logging out the moment they go to sleep. (Coincidentally, the fictional reason why society went in this direction was a global pandemic that drove people inside.) What the inhabitants of this future world didnt realize is that as they lived their lives in the Metaverse, they were being characterized by AI systems that observed all of their actions and reactions and interactions, capturing every sentiment and emotional response so it could build a digital model of their mind from a behavioral perspective rather than from molecular scanning.

After 20 years of collecting data in this dystopian metaverse, the fictional AI system had fully modeled every person in this future society with sufficient detail that it didnt need real people anymore. After all, real humans are less efficient, as we need food and housing and healthcare. The digital copies didnt need any of that. And so, guess what the fictional AI system decided to do? It convinced all of us biological people to upgrade ourselves by ending our own lives and allowing the digital copies to replace us. And we were willing to do it under the false notion that we would be immortal.

Thats what mind uploading really means. It means ending humanity and replacing it with a digital representation. I wrote Upgrade 14 years ago because I genuinely believe we humans might be foolish enough to head in that direction, ending our biological existence in favor of a purely digital one.

Why is this bad? If you think Big Tech has too much power now having the ability to track what you do and moderate the information you access imagine what it will be like when human minds are trapped inside the systems they control, unable to exit. That is the future many are pushing for. Its terrifying. Mind uploading is not the path to immortality some believe.

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A fake salsa band ignites the rebirth of an old New York record label – EL PAS USA

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A new album will land on the salsa dance floor by the end of this week; one that fuses rhythms from the 1970s with the technological dystopias of the future. Behind it is Ansonia Records, a label that, after its creation in 1949 among Latino immigrants from New York, would produce several merengue, jibara, bomba, guaracha, mambo, and boogaloo albums, before stopping altogether in 1990. This Friday, after more than 30 years, Ansonia Records will return with a salsa album.

Hermano del futuro, vengo buscando iluminacin; brother from the future, I come looking for enlightenment. So says one of the songs from the new album, called Metamorfosis, by the old salsa group Renacimiento. But there is a catch: Renacimiento does not exist. It never did. It is a fake group, and this is a fake cover, explains musician Eblis lvarez, founder of the Colombian group Meridian Brothers, who had already experimented with various genres, from cumbia to vallenato. A group that practices tropical cannibalism, says lvarez. This year, Meridian Brothers decided to launch a group of salseros straight out of fiction: Renacimiento.

Renacimiento [rebirth] is the typical name that musicians would give a salsa group in the 1970s, lvarez tells EL PAS. For example, in the Nueva Trova movement there was talk of a political rebirth, but at the same time they combined this with a spiritual factor: when one listens to groups like La Columna de Fuego [from Bogota] or Los Jaivas [from Chile], there was a common pattern: everyone was waiting for a rebirth of the soul, and of society.

Although on stage Renacimiento is made up of five artists Mara Valencia, Alejandro Forero, Csar Quevedo and Mauricio Ramrez, besides lvarez when the album was recorded it was the founder who played all the instruments, besides doing the voice of the salsero that accompanies the songs. The album has nine tracks, some similar to the older, slower salsa, and others to the faster, contemporary style. Between the piano, the timbales and the percussion, we find verses with the concerns of the 21st century: love that communicates by algorithm, or the threats of atomic bombs that take us to the cemetery. Metamorfosis, the single that has already been released, begins with a man who wakes up turned into a robot and longs for a time when nightclubs really had an atmosphere, not like now, full of cameras, full of drones.

I wanted it to sound like salsa from the 1970s, says lvarez. There is no originality, or the originality of this lies in being able to replicate the music as best as possible, but in terms of the material there is nothing original, as it is made with the collective unconscious of Latin America, of Colombia, of Latinos. This is an extrapolation from the 1970s to today, and it speaks of transhumanism, like the matter of highest concern that everything, absolutely everything, is now packed inside the damn cell phone.

The rebirth includes both the album and the label, as this is the first recording in more than 30 years to be released by Ansonia Records, a company created in 1949 and later forgotten, despite having been one of the first labels founded by a Latin migrant in the United States. Puerto Rican Rafael Prez, its founder, brought Dominican, Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians from Latin Harlem or the South Bronx, who had not found a home among American record companies, to several studios. He produced his records before the time of the powerful Fania, which made New York salsa famous.

To Liza Richardson, an American radio host who was also a music supervisor on series like Narcos or the movie Y tu mam tambin, Ansonia Records is a gem. In the early 1990s, she found an Ansonia album in the stations archives and, fascinated by the labels production, became close to the heirs of Prez. In 2020, she bought the record label with the intention of reactivating it. She, with the help of a small team, has begun to digitize more than 5,000 Ansonia-produced songs; an eighth of them can already be found on streaming platforms like Spotify.

Souraya Al-Alaoui, manager of Ansonia Records, explains that most of the artists chosen by the label were focused on the Latin American diaspora. That was their base; they valued the traditional sounds from islands like Cuba or Puerto Rico, and were not looking to become westernized.

Johnny Pacheco, founder of La Fania, started with Ansonia Records, and Ansonia was an inspiration for what would later become La Fania, says Al-Alaoui. Ansonia was also a pioneer as a label owned by a Latino, an independent label with a founding message: this is from us and for us. Thats why it was an inspiration for what came after.

Over the years, La Fania grew and the seed of Ansonia Records faded away. The label never managed to promote its musicians in concerts like La Fania did, and after the arrival of the digital world, they did not set up a website or try to upload their music to any streaming platforms. Thus, it became a label that was only known by a small group of music lovers, like Liza Richardson and Eblis lvarez.

Now, we are hoping to release a new record every year, and we are thrilled to start with this one by Meridian Brothers, says Richardson. This is an album that looks to the past but tries to move towards the future, and that is exactly what we are trying to do: look to the past to, at some point, be able to grow again, to thrive.

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WISeKey Strengthens its Technology Portfolio Across Cybersecurity, IoT, NFT and the Metaverse – MarTech Series

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WISeKey Strengthens its Technology Portfolio Across Cybersecurity, IoT, NFT and the Metaverse by Constantly Learning and Adapting to Provide Customers with a Highly Trusted, Secure, and Intelligent Platform for Their Digital Transformation

WISeKey International Holding Ltd. , a leading global cybersecurity, IoT, and AI company, announced its latest Cybersecurity IoT developments reinforcing the position of WISeKey as a major player on these strategic technologies.

The pace of change being experienced since the start of COVID-19 pandemic in almost every industry is unprecedented; this has led to the acceleration of digital transformations. Private, public entities and governments across the globe seeking to seize on the huge opportunities ahead, are also facing huge challenges presented by the merge of the IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, Trust, Identity Management and the Metaverse, thus they need a new platform model that transforms their operations, protects their data and customers while at the same time reduces complexity, accelerates service deployment, and increases security.

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To satisfy clients needs WISeKey has embarked on a major digital transformation adding new verticals and activities that can be summarized as follows:

1.WISe.ART platform: WISe.ARTs unique competitive edge comes from its platform which is secured by WISeKeys various security technologies enabling the authentication of digital identity based NFTs, physical objects as well as digital assets, in a safe end-to-end process. The WISe.ART platform offers users full control of their WISeID NFT, while other NFTs must request access to identity information and WISeID NFTs users then can decide by themselves what level of information they wish to share. New artists joining the WISe.ART NFT Marketplace that increasingly see a future for the tokens that upends the economics of content creation and influence on the internet. Almost 100 artists have already joined the WISe.ART NFT Marketplace with approximately 500 products, adding a commercial NFT sales potential aggregate of $20 million worth of NFTs.

2.WISeSat solutions: WISeSat is the first cost-effective and secure IoT connectivity solution anywhere on Earth using picosatellites and low-power sensors. It aims to answer the needs of any large IoT deployment in agrotech, energy, logistics and more. WISeSat collects and sends data from terrestrial sensors, increasing knowledge of the status of assets and offering essential information to improve processes and optimize production. These interactions between sensors, gateways, ground stations and satellites require Trust. WISeSat, by using VaultIC, a complete cryptographic toolbox that makes straightforward the integration of digital security in any satellite device, offers this Trust. It ensures all Certificate-based Authentication (PKI), Authorization, Encryption, and Integrity requirements. The goal is to offer this service in a SaaS model allowing both remote and redundant IoT communications for companies seeking to securely connect their assets via satellite communication, covering large and unserved geographic areas such as maritime, deserts, mountains, etc., at affordable prices. WISeKey in cooperation with FOSSA Systems has launched in June 2022 , 7 new WISeSat FOSSA secured satellites creating one of the largest European IoT constellations in history. FOSSA has increased to 13 the WISeSat-ready constellation in orbit, becoming the Spanish satellite operator with the largest constellation.

3.Patents:The filing of patent application for a System and Method for Providing Persistent Authenticatable NFT with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), under the number US 17/514,296 ensures the provenance, authenticity, persistence, and long-term value of NFTs that are minted on Blockchains using this method. During the minting process, this method allows to ensure that the NFT is not corrupted, incomplete, or ambiguous. In general, there is a high confidence in the ability of a Blockchain to preserve and store the public key and digital signature information of the NFT along with any subsequent transaction data over long and very long periods of time. However, a Blockchain cannot preserve information that the NFT does not itself include. Such as disclosed in the patent application, it is the information in a persistent off-chain storage that establishes the value and that needs to be authenticated and secured.

4.NanoSealRT: The development of a new semiconductor theNanoSealRT, an NFC Forum Type 5 semiconductor chip that works with both Android and IOS 12 (and above) devices (the essential patent granted in March 2021 by the E.U. and the Chinese Patent Offices), further reinforced WISeKeys position as a major Smart Label system provider in traceability, anti-counterfeiting and consumer engagement applications.

5.Post-quantum NFC/ID card solutions: WISeKey and Synergy Quantum are currently developing post-quantum NFC/ID card solutions for second factor identification and post-quantum encryption chips and software platform for PQE tunnelling solutions.

Of note, in October 2021, Synergy Quantum SA signed a joint venture agreement with the I-Hub Quantum Technology Foundation, under the National Mission for Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India to provide its knowhow and skills for the productization and commercialization of co-developed technologies in the field of quantum sciences.

On December 15, 2021, Indias Union Cabinet approved the Semicon India Program (Program for Development of Semiconductors and Display Manufacturing Ecosystem in India), with an outlay of INR 760 billion (>US$10 billion) for the development of a sustainable semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in India. According to the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, semiconductor consumption in India was worth US$21 billion in 2019, growing at the rate of 15.1 percent.

6.Universal Communications Identifier (UCID):WISeKey has also made strong progress on using WISeID as a Universal Communications Identifier (UCID), a unique identifier for an IoT device on a network; the blockchain, a distributed ledger shared with the nodes of a computer network guarantees security and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), cryptographic assets on a blockchain cannot be replicated. The combined practical application of these technologies implementing UCID on the device, using NFTs, and putting them on the blockchain ensures that the device itself is authenticated on a network that cannot be corrupted.

7.NCCoE project: WISeKeys strategy to further expand its U.S. operations will also benefit from the recent announcement it has been selected as a collaborator by NIST for the NCCoE Trusted IoT Device Network-Layer Onboarding and Lifecycle Management Consortium project. For this project, WISeKey is working with NIST to define recommended practices for performing trusted network-layer onboarding, which will aid in the implementation and use of trusted onboarding solutions for IoT devices at scale. The WISeKey contributions to the project will be Trust Services for credentials and secure semiconductors to keep the credentials secure. Specifically, WISeKey will offer INeS Certificate Management Service (CMS) for issuing credentials and VaultIC secure semiconductors to provide tamperproof key storage and cryptographic acceleration.

8.The Code to The Metaverse:This year The Code to The Metaverse, was officially introduced at Davos in May in a broader partnership with NBC, who will be producing a 12-part multi-media series to include broadcast, event and social media programming. Grounded in a human-centric foundation,The transHuman Codeprovides an ethical platform for developers, enablers and users of new technologies to prioritize keeping people at the center of gravity in the relationship between woman/man and machine. With its roots in the development of secure identity management, WISeKey has stood at the forefront of providing greater security for data authentication since 1999. In the future,The transHuman Codeplatform, secured by WISeKey, could seamlessly ensure that technological innovations protect humans in the all environments. Our co-existence with artificial intelligence will challenge all conventions of ethical norms as we have known them, as we continue to digitize our work environment, our social interaction, and our physical activities. Recent developments have forced governments around the world to take steps to quickly understand how Metaverse, this new frontier of innovation, is challenging the traditional conception of Sovereignty. With data being stored virtually on the Metaverse anywhere in the world and government employees and citizens using information technology systems that are hosted and operated from anywhere (even outside of their jurisdiction), the expected sovereign rights over that date on the Metaverse needs to be reconsidered. Many information technology companies are telling governments that that their versions of the Metaverse will be enough to ensure sovereignty over their data and citizens. Others are stating that new legislation is needed to protect citizens. All in all, the solutions they propose are partial and unsatisfactory.

9.Cybersecurity Tech Accord membership: WISeKey is a member of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord is a public commitment among more than 150 global technology companies to protect, empower and improve security, stability and resilience of cyberspace. Since its inception, Cybersecurity Tech Accord signatories have supported initiatives on improving email and routing security, implemented Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) in their own operations, participated in global requests for comments on the UNs new High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, and endorsed the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. Additionally, the coalition has coordinated with like-minded organizations such as the Global Cyber Alliance, Internet Society, and Global Forum on Cyber Expertise.

10.Clinton Global Initiate: WISeKey will be joining the Clinton Global Initiate in September 2022 to address Digital Identification issues as part of the United Nations SDG. WISeKey, in cooperation with the International Organization for Secure Transactions Foundation (OISTE.org), will be providing a Digital Identification Infrastructure-NETeID-designed to support a network of 20,000 Identification Authorities worldwide with the objective to issue a billion digital identities. Each of these 20,000 Identification Authorities operating from 189 countries will be authorized to issue Digital Identities locally.

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Artist Stelarcs creature comes to life at Science Gallery – The Age

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Performance artist Stelarc is world-renowned for using his body as a canvas for his art, which explores themes of the post and trans-human, from voluntary surgeries (yes, he still has his third ear, now a permanent part of his body, on his forearm), his flesh-hook suspensions and robotic attachments. But his latest work is a stand-alone installation that not only operates without the artist present, but is effectively controlled by anyone.

For the Science Gallery Melbournes new exhibition Swarm, Stelarc worked with Dr Paul Loh from the Melbourne School of Design and David Leggett from LLDS Architecture to create an enormous kinetic sculpture which senses and responds to the presence of humans. The project is also a collaboration with PhD students at the School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Pelican Studios and pneumatic and electric automation company Festo.

Swarm, which features 16 large-scale installations from around the world, explores ideas of collective behaviour, highlighting the way social behaviour underlies everything from molecular movements, the lives of insects, the algorithms in our hyper-connected digital world and how AI and new technologies replicate swarming behaviour.

Artist Stelarc with his work Anthropomorphic Machine at Science Gallery Melbourne.Credit:Chris Hopkins

Stelarcs eight-metre high Anthropomorphic Machine, which will sit in the Gallerys corner window on Swanston St, uses a system of cameras to detect visitors and reacts in real time to their gestures and movements. And while its a machine, it does so using the principles of human body structure.

Its a robot in the sense that its a machine thats interactive and responsive, says Stelarc, but its not your usual humanoid or insect-like robot.

He describes it as an alternative anatomical architecture. The work is anthropomorphic in the sense that its not figurative, but in the sense that it has skeletal tensegrity structure it has other muscles, steel tendons, a circulatory system of air, pneumatic lungs and a computational system.

A series of cameras are linked to the machine to detect the space beneath and around the structure, and whether a person is in proximity. Depending on whether the person is static or moving around, the machine will respond differently via a system of pneumatic rubber muscles that work with compressed air, which move all or some of 498 stainless-steel struts held together by cables.

Stelarc with his third ear which was implanted in his forearm in 2012.Credit:Helen Nezdropa

The whole structure is flexible and deformable, says Stelarc. As a muscle contracts in length, it pulls part of the structure it then deforms the tensegrity.

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The machines cameras track the dynamic behaviour of the crowd, the speed of interaction between people, and their distribution, using what Science Gallery Melbourne Director and Swarm curator Dr Ryan Jeffries calls a swarm algorithm.

I see also the structure itself becoming like a murmuration, says Jeffries, but also responding to groups of people, and thats at the heart of Swarm in terms of social, collective behaviour.

When still, the machine is beautiful, its rubber and steel parts appearing to float mid-air, but it becomes something eerie when its moving, as air hisses and the struts clank gently.

Stelarcs artwork is a machine that operates with a human-like bodily structure.Credit:Chris Hopkins

As the struts change their positioning orientation, it can be described as a kind of swarming, says Stelarc, where one strut affects another and the movement spreads across the structure. Its also about the notion of machine aliveness what constitutes a machine, what sort of vocabulary of movements generate a sense of aliveness.

Anthropomorphic Machine can also be controlled remotely; people can log on to a website and interact with the machine at any time which might be alarming for passersby.

If you go to a website, the camera switches on and your movements in front of the camera can make it respond remotely. Anyone, anywhere at any time can access the robot and animate it, explains Stelarc. Halfway through the night, when nobody is here, it is lit up, and[it] will start responding.

Stelarc, now 76, has long been interested in the idea of bodies being physically separated but electronically connected. Before most of us even knew what the internet was, he staged an interactive performance in the mid-90s called Fractal Flesh.

My body was in Luxembourg, and people in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the media lab in Helsinki, and a conference in Amsterdam could access my body and remotely activate it via muscle stimulation, he says. There was no exoskeleton involved just 50 volts in different body sites which made my body move, done with a touchstone interface.

He performed a similar piece, ReWired/ReMixed, in Perth, where he lives, in 2016 at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art, using an exoskeleton arm controlled remotely by strangers. Wearing a mask and headphones, he also decoupled his vision and hearing.

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For five days, six hours a day, I could only hear with ears that were in New York, I could only see with eyes in London and anyone, anywhere at any time could access my right arm and remotely animate it.

Wasnt that weird? Yes, he says. But most things I do are weird. A touch of understatement from the man who, with his partner and frequent collaborator Nina Sellars, created the work Blender, which used combined sterilised bodily material surgically extracted from the pair inside a sealed, air-powered machine.

That work was, he says the inverse of his 1993 work The Stomach Sculpture, in which he swallowed a small crab-like robotic sculpture which opened and closed, had a flashing light, and made a beeping sound, and was filmed through an endoscopic camera fed into his oesophagus.

With Blender, instead of a machine choreographing inside a soft human body, here a machine becomes the host for a liquid body composed of biomaterial from two artists bodies. There were proximity senses around the machine so when people approached, it triggered the blender blades to blend the material.

Anthropomorphic Machine, in comparison, seems almost conservative, despite its human-machine hybridity. Its a continuation, Stelarc says, of his works around machine bodiments and hybridities.

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Because of its skeletal structure, the pneumatic rubber muscles, the circulatory system of compressed air, the pneumatic lung, the vision and computational system, he says, if you werent referring to a machine, those descriptions might easily refer to a body.

Late-night CBD pedestrians have been warned.

Swarm is at Science Gallery Melbourne, August 13 - December 3. On August 20, Anthropomorphic Machine will perform with dancer Carol Brown and the Bolt Ensemble. melbourne.sciencegallery.com

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One of the biggest names in quantum computing could have just cracked open the multibillion-dollar market with a new breakthrough – Fortune

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Quantinuum, the quantum computing company spun out from Honeywell, said this week that it had made a breakthrough in the technology that should help accelerate commercial adoption of quantum computers.

It has to do with real-time correction of errors.

One of the biggest issues with using quantum computers for any practical purpose is that the circuits in a quantum computer are highly susceptible to all kinds of electromagnetic interference, which causes errors in its calculations. These calculation errors must be corrected, either by using software, often after a calculation has run, or by using other physical parts of the quantum circuitry to check for and correct the errors in real time. So far, while scientists have theorized ways for doing this kind of real-time error correction, few of the methods had been demonstrated in practice on a real quantum computer.

The theoretically game-changing potential of quantum computers stems from their ability to harness the strange properties of quantum mechanics. These machines may also speed up the time it takes to run some calculations that can be done today on supercomputers, but which take hours or days. In order to achieve those results, though, ironing out the calculation errors is of utmost importance. In 2019, Google demonstrated that a quantum computer could perform one esoteric calculation in 200 seconds that it estimated would have taken a traditional supercomputer more than 10,000 years to compute. In the future, scientists think quantum computers will help make the production of fertilizer much more efficient and sustainable as well as create new kinds of space-age materials.

Thats why it could be such a big deal that Quantinuum just said it has demonstrated two methods for doing real-time error correction of the calculations a quantum computer runs.

Tony Uttley, Quantinuums chief operations officer, says the error-correction demonstration is an important proof point that the company is on track to being able to deliver a quantum advantage for some real-world commercial applications in the next 18 to 24 months. That means businesses will able to run some calculationspossibly for financial risk or logistics routingsignificantly faster, and perhaps with better results, by using quantum computers for at least part of the calculation than they could by just using standard computer hardware. This lends tremendous credibility to our road map, Uttley said.

Theres a lot of money in Quantinuums road map. This past February, the firms majority shareholder, Honeywell, foresaw revenue in Quantinuums future of $2 billion by 2026. That future could have just drawn nearer.

Uttley says that today, there is a wide disparity in the amount of money different companies, even direct competitors in the same industry, are investing in quantum computing expertise and pilot projects. The reason, he says, is that there are widely varying beliefs in how soon quantum computers will be able to run key business processes faster or better than existing methods on standard computers. Some people think it will happen in the next two years. Others think these nascent machines will only start to realize their business potential a decade from now. Uttley says he hopes this weeks error-correction breakthrough will help tip more of Quantinuums potential customers into the two-year camp.

A $2 billion market opportunity

Honeywells projection of at least $2 billion in revenue from quantum computing by 2026 was a revisiona year earlier than it had previously forecast. The error-correction breakthrough ought to give Honeywell more confidence in that projection.Quantinuum is one of the most prominent players in the emerging quantum computer industry, with Honeywell having made a bold and so far successful bet on one particular way of creating a quantum computer. That method is based on using powerful electromagnets to trap and manipulate ions. Others, such as IBM , Google, and Rigetti Computing, have created quantum computers using superconducting materials. Microsoft has been trying to create a variation of this superconducting-based quantum computer but using a slightly different technology that would be less prone to errors. Still others are creating quantum computers using lasers and photons. And some companies, such as Intel, have been working on quantum computers where the circuits are built using more conventional semiconductors.

The ability to perform real-time error correction could be a big advantage for Quantinuum and its trapped-ionbased quantum computers as it competes for a commercial edge over competing quantum computer companies. But Uttley points out that besides selling access to its own trapped-ion quantum computers through the cloud, Quantinuum also helps customers run algorithms on IBMs superconducting quantum computers. (IBM is also an investor in Quantinuum.)

Different kinds of algorithms and calculations may be better suited to one kind of quantum computer over another. Trapped ions tend to remain in a quantum state for relatively long periods of timewith the record being an hour. Superconducting circuits, on the other hand, tend to stay in a quantum state for a millisecond or less. But this also means that it takes much longer for a trapped-ion quantum computer to run a calculation than for a superconducting one, Uttley says. He envisions a future of hybrid computing where different parts of an algorithm are run on different machines in the cloudpartially on a traditional computer, partly on a trapped-ion quantum computer, and partly on a superconducting quantum computer.

In a standard computer, information is represented in a binary form, either a 0 or a 1, called a bit. Quantum computers use the principles of quantum mechanics to form their circuits, with each unit of the circuit called a qubit. Qubits can represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously. This means that each additional qubit involved in performing calculations doubles the power of a quantum computer. This doubling of power for every additional qubit is one reason that quantum computers will, in theory, be far more powerful than even todays largest supercomputers. But this is only true if the issue of error-correction can be successfully tackled and if scientists can figure out how to successfully link enough qubits together to exceed the power of existing standard high-performance computing clusters.

Quantinuum demonstrated two different error-correction methodsone called the five-qubit code and the other called the Steane code. Both methods use multiple physical qubits to represent one logical part of the circuit, with some of those qubits actually performing the calculation and the others checking and correcting errors in the calculation. As the name suggests, the five-qubit code uses five qubits, while the Steane code uses seven qubits. Uttley says that Quantinuum discovered that the Steane code worked significantly better than the five-qubit code.

That may mean it will become the dominant form of error correction, at least for trapped-ion quantum computers, going forward.

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No One Gets Quantum Computing, Least Of All America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology – PC Perspective

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The only good news about Americas National Institute of Standards and Technology new Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation, designed to be unbreakable by a quantum computer, is that it was subjected to extra testing before it became one of their four new quantum encryption algorithms. As it turns out, two Belgians named Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru were able to break the Microsoft SIKE in under five minutes using a Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 at 2.60GHz.

Indeed, they did it with a single core, which makes sense for security researchers well aware of the risks of running multithreaded; though why they stuck with a 22nm Ivy Bridge processor almost 10 years old is certainly a question. What makes even less sense is that encryption designed to resist quantum computing could be cracked by a traditional piece of silicon before the heat death of the universe.

This particular piece of quantum encryption has four parameter sets, called SIKEp434, SIKEp503, SIKEp610 and SIKEp751. The $50,000 bounty winners were able to crack SIKEp434 parameters in about 62 minutes. Two related instances, $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 they were able to crack in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes respectively. There are three other quantum encryption standards proposed along with this one, so there is some hope that they will be useful for now at least.

If you would like to read more about quantum computing, encryption as well as Richelot isogenies and abelian surfaces then read on at The Register.

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D-Wave and DPCM Complete Their Business Combination – Quantum Computing Report

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D-Wave and DPCM Complete Their Business Combination

The companies announced that their SPAC merger has been approved and that D-Wave will become a public company and will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbols QBTS for the common stock and QBTS WS for the warrants. Members of the companys management will ring the opening bell of the NYSE when trading starts on Monday, August 8. The transaction was first announced in February of this year and a shareholder vote to approve it occurred earlier this week. Shareholders of DPCM Capitals Class A Common Stock had the right to redeem their shares for pro rata portion of the funds in the companys trust account. The shareholders elected to redeem about 29 million of these shares out of the 37.5 million total requiring a total payment of $291 million for the redemptions. So those funds will not be available to D-Wave for working capital. Additional information about the completion of this business combination is available in a press release that can be seen here and also the Form 8-K the companies have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) here.

August 5, 2022

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