While reading The Cuckoo’s Egg it occurred to me just how much the Internet has changed since the time frame in which this story occurred. We now access information from everywhere; it is used for everything. The air around us is filled with digital information at different frequencies carrying the requests and the answers to the requests of millions of users. That air contains everything from the voices of the prophets to social security, bank, and credit card numbers to porn and pirated music. People are using the Internet for everything both good and evil. And, everything that they use it for is stored in a digital format that is converted into waves at different frequencies that travel from place to place through a complex network of wires, cell towers, wireless routers, satilite links, and more.
The safty of this traveling information is of the utmost concern to many. Copyrighted or private data that can be used to identify individuals is sensitve and we don’t want just anybody having access to it. As a matter of fact we only want ourselves and those we specifically intent to inform to know what we are saying. So we encrypt things. And as computing power increases and people figure out how to break our encryptions, we encrypt things more securely. The funny thing is that most of this encryption relies on RSA. And what makes that funny, at least to me, is that RSA would be easily crackable if the Quantum Computer is ever invented.
This brings me to the topic that I would have actually writen about if I only had one paragraph: The Quantum Computer would be a nuclear bomb to the Internet. Privacy would vanish. Encryption as we know it today would be completely ineffective, and there would be no way of submitting information to only the intended recipient. Only by physically keeping others away from the information would keep things protected, and even that would be only a wire splice away from being looked at. With a Quantum Computer any good computer scientist could break the best “secure” system there is today. That is scary stuff. I wonder if it will ever happen. Maybe keeping private computer networks seperated entirely from the Internet for super classified information is really the best way to go.
