Maybe I am missing something here, how do you get information from one entity to another and back without something, especially a keycode, being transmitted over space, air, water, whatever?
Believe me, I know this stuff is seriously mind-boggling.
You can develop a pair of particles that, no matter how far away they are from each other, always have a relationship in their quantum state. By reading one, you know what the quantum state is on the other.
If you store information by making changes in the quantum state of one of the particles, you immediately transmit that information to the other particle. And “they” are now very good at making changes in the quantum state of an electron in an isolated phosphorus atom on a sheet of silicon.
For several years now, they could capture a photon generated by such an electron and transmit it over fiber where they could “read” the photon and accurately describe the quantum state of the electron where it came from, i.e. capture data from it (up to 2 kilobits last I read). But there’s no way to do that with a satellite.
So, if the article is true, it means the Chinese are using quantum entanglement, which I knew some people were working on but I thought it would be a long, long time coming. Apparently not, and that means big things are going to happen sooner that expected.
For more reading, here’s the Wikipedia on quantum entanglement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement