IBM touts quantum computing breakthrough

Computerworld has the story that IBM reached another breakthrough in quantum computing. The breakthrough allowed scientists to reduce data error rates in elementary computations while maintaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits of data, known as qubits. It will probably take another 15 years before the first real quantum computers are build but they are at least not only theoretical possible anymore.

Child abuse suspect won't be forced to decrypt hard drive

The Register reports an important ruling in a case about encrypted harddrives. The ruling by the Atlanta-based US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of an unnamed suspect from Florida goes against US legal thinking in previous cases where courts held a person ought to be obliged to turn over encryption codes or passwords in a criminal investigation. The ruling probably will hold to the Supreme Court but do not expect to end it there. In name of "think of the children" we are likely to see a prohibition of encrypting harddrives for personal use in the near future in the US.

Global DNS takedown plotters disowned by Anonymous

The hard part of being anonymous is to be recognised when someone anonymous pretends to be you. The Register reports that the most likely trustworthy source of Anonymous denies any involvement with a announced attack against the DNS rootservers on 31st March. The twittersource suspects fear-mongering from NSA or likewise organisation to gain support for the 2012 cyber-security bill in the Senate. The sad part is that it is a very likely possibility. Most people writing new legislation do think they do not have to obey those same rules themselves.

Squirrelled away: seeds survive 30,000-year winter

The Register has a remarkable report about 30,000 years old seeds which has used to grown viable plants from them. Not technology related indeed but interesting questions about the origin of permafrost. The possibility of more seeds or other old DNA present in the permafrost raises more and more questions.

Slow smartphone? It's not the network, it's NAND flash

Computerworld reports some interesting research. While users and experts typically point to processor chips and wireless network connectivity as the culprit of poor smartphone performance, storage is more of an issue, according to researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and NEC Corp. This researchers are of course not neutral because they want to promote phase-change random access memory (PRAM) as some form of caching for writing NAND flash. But even keeping that in mind the speed differences between the tested embedded flash memory cards are really remarkable.

'Predictably random' public keys can be cracked - crypto boffins

The Register reports about public keys who can be cracked because poor random-number generation algorithms led to shared prime factors in key generation. The SSL protocol itself is not the problem but the bad choice of random numbers which appear not be that random at all. Two per thousand keys are affected which is a lot observering the growing number of keys used today. Vendors have been warned but how many will take action for existing customer installations? Undoubtly to be continued!