World Record: Light Freezed For One Minute And Released!

[Stone1]

Saturdays there's a science page my newspaper, and today a really interesting progress is the main topic:

Conservation of information inside a magnetically and high-frequency pulsed shielded crystal containing Praseodym ions is now possible. The shielding from outer influences is essential and controlled by a computer-algorithm. A stripe-pattern of laserlight was preserved for a whole minute and could be read-out afterwards. This is a major step towards optical circuits, the team is now working on storing information for up to one week and getting higher bandwith and data transfer-rates.

The paper is to be found at:

([66], 2013)

I wonder how long it will take until Intel releases its first optical-cpu? And when late-adopters like me will get a nice PC for less than €1.000,-

Edit: I just wrote this down because I think it could turn out as a major step towards digital omortality...

[HarryStottle]

don't disagree. In principle, anything which speeds up data handling, storage and recovery contributes to making Omortality more viable. I think the key hardware is going to be a massive increase in storage capacity, about a million times present day should do it. But given that for the past couple of decades we've achieved a thousandfold improvement in each decade, that implies that particular obstacle will be overcome within 20 years. Optics of some kind might well be fundamental to that as my own best guess is that we'll store digital minds, initially at least, in crystalline cubes where all the data is stored as holograms...

(will get back to your other posts eventually. Stuck in the middle of a forensic data recovery job atmo)

[Stone1]

Yes though there's a good chance that we see (affordable) optical computing and holographic data storage still in our lifetimes, and considering how sci-fi that was just a few decades ago, that's great (must be the little nerd inside of me)!

No need to hurry on the other answers, Harry, if I find time I'll post an update with (english) links on the SSL/HTTPS troubles (mainly the CA-implementation in MS Windows has an open backdoor, and am making myself familiar with (Ubuntu)Linux atm, planning to run a double-boot system where Windows will be used for gaming and multimedia purposes only, but that includes much of trial and even more error).

[HarryStottle]

with regard to broken SSL, are you talking about

(and while you're at the reg, you might wanna check out to the news that Lavabit and Silent Mail have given up the ghost...

[Stone1]

Biting into my wooden desktop

Arrgh! Just on Friday I read about (Perfect) Forward Secrecy in my german IT-mag and there's a handful of email providers using it, and today you (or the reg) tells me that the MIB are shutting them down already?!
I wonder when or whether gmx will be forced to stand down as well. That's a slap in the face. And only half of the story. I'm too outraged right now to investigate deeper on the verisign trusted certificate topic, but in short there's a Windows backdoor (for authorities like the MIB or criminals) to smuggle a wrong certificate into the chain and the (normal) user never notices this. Mainly IE and chrome users and, sadly enough, soon also Opera lovers like me (they will give up their own presto-engine soon) are affected. Firefox brings its own encryption suite and is not affected by this (yet). So I'll have to give up my good old Opera after all these years? Phah, I'll just keep on using my older version until it breaks down.
Also, if I were you, Harry, I wouldn't ever use any 'cloud' storage, however strong you encrypt your data. Guess who will be the first to use quantum-decryption? And they're storing everything for later decryption. Storage is cheap, so buy another 4TB harddisk and keep your data at home.

If we get to store our data holographically though, all will get a bit more complicated still, so let's keep ourselves informed. Us old IT foxes that we will be then.

Listened to some Queen: A Night At The Opera and calmed down a bit
(Completely OT) Do you think by the way that my english has rusted during the years that have passed since our initial acquaintance, Mr. Stottle?

Oh, just before submitting I discovered that the chrome-Opera browser will be called Opera Next, so there might still be hope that the Presto-engine will be continued. I'm having my fingers crossed.

[HarryStottle]

'twas always a bad security model - having a man in the middle responsible for the encryption keys. But there remain plenty of other reasonably secure means of communicating (pgp being the obvious one). None, of course, are as easy to use as the ones we're about to lose (or have lost), which means the vast majority simply won't bother and that in turn focusses attention on the few that do.

What we cannot achieve (easily), on the web at least, is privacy regarding who we are communicating with and that kind of metadata can be just as useful/revealing as actual content; particularly if you're trying to set up/run (or track) a dissident network to oppose your authoritarian government.

Regarding cloud storage, depends why you want to store something. If it needs to be both private AND shared, you're probably right. It will never be safe because you'll have to share keys - which has just been made much more difficult by compromising the SSL channel - and which implies a crypto algorithm eventually breakable. But if you're simply looking for a safe place to store personal private material long term, the obvious solution is one time padding - which will remain immune even to quantum decryption techniques. Just make sure you have a high quality source of entropy!

If, on the other hand, you're just using it for "commercially sensitive" material, it's probably OK as is because it doesn't really matter if the NSA can read your detailed budget forecasts (or whatever) in 20 years time...

on your English language skills, they seem to be better than some of my contributors whose first language is English, so I don't think you have much to worry about! Very occasionally I come across something in your contributions which looks mangled but I've been attributing that to a high probability of writing while stoned and we all do that!