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Opinion The scientific community celebrated April 14 as World Quantum Day to raise awareness of quantum science’s impact across diverse fields The world of science is on the cusp of a transformative era driven by the burgeoning field of quantum technology. Quantum science is founded on several key principles that underpin the behaviour of particles and systems at the quantum scale. The term “quantum scale” refers to the realm of physics that deals with phenomena occurring at very small scales, typically at the level of atoms, subatomic particles and fundamental particles. It encompasses the principles of quantum mechanics, which govern...

This late-medieval document is covered in illustrations of stars and planets, plants, zodiac symbols, naked women, and blue and green fluids. But the text itself – thought to be the work of five different scribes – is enciphered and yet to be understood.In an article published in Social History of Medicine, my coauthor Michelle L. Lewis and I propose that sex is one of the subjects detailed in the manuscript – and that the largest diagram represents both sex and conception.Late-medieval sexology and gynaecologyResearch on the Voynich manuscript has revealed some clues about its origins. Carbon dating provides a 95%...

For centuries people have tried to decipher the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, and now a computer scientist claims to have cracked it using AI. The 600-year-old document is described as 'the world's most mysterious medieval text', and is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures. The 240-page manual's intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers. But even the cryptographers from Bletchley Park, the team that broke the Nazi enigma code, couldn't make sense of the manuscript. Now a computer scientist says the...

The 600-year-old document is described as 'the world's most mysterious medieval text.' It is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures, as well as many pages written in an unknown text. Now, one British academic claims the document is in fact a health manual for a 'well-to-do' lady looking to treat gynaecological conditions.

It takes only a second to crack the handful of weak keys. Are there more out there? Cryptographic keys generated with older software now owned by technology company Rambus are weak enough to be broken instantly using commodity hardware, a researcher reported on Monday. This revelation is part of an investigation that also uncovered a handful of weak keys in the wild. "The problem is that both primes are too similar," Böck said in an interview. "So the difference between the two primes is really small."

Satoshi Nakamoto and the Civil-War Within Bitcoin |

A supercomputer programmed to think like the notorious Zodiac killer produced some creepy poetry when fed all the known writings of the elusive criminal, it was learned Thursday. A University of Southern California professor created an artificial intelligence software that was designed to help crack the code of the Z340, the Zodiac killer’s famous cipher. The ciphers, which were sent with letters to the police and newspapers in Northern California during the 1960s and 70s, contain letters and symbols that may hide clues as to the killer’s identity.

SACRAMENTO - A team of volunteer codebreakers has cracked a mysterious cipher sent more than 50 years ago to a newspaper by the San Francisco serial killer who called himself the Zodiac, the FBI said on Friday. The Zodiac Killer — who was never caught — shot or stabbed seven people in the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of about a year in 1968 and 1969, killing all but two of them. During his murderous spree, he sent a series of terrifying letters to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. Some of the notes were in code, including a...

The solution to what’s known as the 340 Cipher, one of the most vexing mysteries of the Zodiac Killer’s murderous saga, has been found by a code-breaking team from the United States, Australia and Belgium. The cipher, sent in a letter to The Chronicle in November 1969, has been puzzling authorities and amateur sleuths since it arrived 51 years ago. Investigators hoped the Zodiac, who killed five people in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, would reveal his name in one of his many ciphers, but there is no such name in the 340. According to code-breaking expert David...

or more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran,...

One of the things here I've noticed is that there's a debate going on about this topic. Donald Trump is right and I've said it, but come under fire. See the tweet below: Boycott all Apple products until such time as Apple gives cellphone info to authorities regarding radical Islamic terrorist couple from Cal— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2016 It would be one thing to talk about doing this to people who are alive. But the Radical Islamic Terrorists who carried out San Bernadino are dead. I don't care about their civil liberties. Keep America safe, which will...

BITCOIN has a bad reputation. The decentralised digital cryptocurrency, powered by a vast computer network, is notorious for the wild fluctuations in its value, the zeal of its supporters and its degenerate uses, such as extortion, buying drugs and hiring hitmen in the online bazaars of the “dark net”. This is unfair. The value of a bitcoin has been pretty stable, at around $250, for most of this year. Among regulators and financial institutions, scepticism has given way to enthusiasm (the European Union recently recognised it as a currency). But most unfair of all is that bitcoin’s shady image causes...

The great mystery since the NSA and other intelligence agencies’ cyber-spying capabilities became watercooler fodder has not been the why of their actions, but the how? For example, how are they breaking crypto to decode secure Internet communication? A team of cryptographers and computer scientists from a handful of academic powerhouses is pretty confident they have the answer after having pieced together a number of clues from the Snowden documents that have been published so far, and giving the math around the Diffie-Hellman protocol a hard look. The answer is an implementation weakness in Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, specifically in the...

Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user information. The move, announced with the publication of a new privacy policy tied to the release of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, amounts to an engineering solution to a legal quandary: Rather than comply with binding court orders, Apple has reworked...

Over the past 24 hours the website for TrueCrypt (a very widely used encryption solution) was updated with a rather unusually styled message stating that TrueCrypt is “considered harmful” and should not be used.

The abrupt announcement that the widely used, anonymously authored disk-encryption tool Truecrypt is insecure and will no longer be maintained shocked the crypto world--after all, this was the tool Edward Snowden himself lectured on at a Cryptoparty in Hawai'i. Cory Doctorow tries to make sense of it all.

Raymond 'Jerry' Roberts was one of elite team who helped decode messages sent between Hitler and his high command. ne of the last of a team of wartime British codebreakers who deciphered Hitler's messages at Bletchley Park has died after a short illness. Raymond "Jerry" Roberts, 93, from Liphook in Hampshire, was part of a group that cracked the German high command's secret code. Roberts joined Bletchley Park as a German linguist and was among four founder members of the Testery section, named after its head Ralph Tester. Their target was a system known as Tunny, which carried messages between...

A few years back, at the end of 2009, I was approached on two separate occasions by people claiming to be “representatives” of a digital alternative currency format. I was, of course, intrigued by the initial proposal, being that I had been writing for some time on the concept of non-participation as a way to insulate average Americans from the dangers of our unstable fiat driven mainstream economy. Before that, I had already dealt with just about every currency alternative one could imagine; from paper scripts backed by goods, to scripts backed by time or labor, to gold and silver...

The US government's spying budget includes funds to invent new technologies "to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic," leaked documents show. Among the NSA's annual budget of $52.6 billion are requests to bankroll "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" that can beat cryptography and mine regular Internet traffic, new documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the Washington Post reveal. The document in question, the Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Justification -- referred to as the "Black Budget" -- states on page 4: "...we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic." Because of its mention in the...

Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs...