Additionally I'd like to send big thanks to the U.S. government for giving you a root command prompt on important systems: those people know a lot about computer security for sure!

Right. And not just the incompetency of those who set the sandbox, but also the incompetency of those who set up the systems that fell to the virus, while most of the computers attacked did not fail.

There's no reason at all to fall into fatalism and think "zomg LLMs are too good, they can hack anything". They simply can't: the world keeps on running just fine. There are people out there who can secure systems and now doubly-so thanks to the use of LLMs who are incredibly good at helping us automate tedious stuff.

So, yes, OpenAI shouldn't write poor sandboxes but defenders shouldn't get a free-pass to set up sloppy systems that can be trivially hacked. We're passed that point: poorly secured systems aren't acceptable anymore.

It's the thing that runs your AI agent, that runs your AI pocket bot (AIBI looks cute btw), that runs the software doing the training of AI models, that runs the datacenters doing the inference, etc.

There's still data. There are still bits moving. Filesystems and networking aren't going anywhere.

In a charitable reading the title is something like "what is even a desktop OS now?" or "what is even a consumer OS now?".

As for the new project, I've got one bet: there's Linux involved to host it.

Linux is an OS.

P.S: as a sidenote the entire "users don't install apps anymore" was already true to some extent. A shitload of users are totally fine with an OS that runs a browser and that's it. And they're fully operational. And we still all know what an OS is, even for, say, a Chromebook. Heck, I'm not even sure "installing apps" as ever been, except during the first install of the OS, what an OS was ever about.

What about future attacks by quantum computers? Is Git safe from quantum computers for it's all hashes only? Or shall there be issues with quantum attacks?

I'm asking for there are several projects that are already moving to quantum-resistant schemes (like OpenSSH who uses an hybrid scheme [1]).

[1] https://www.openssh.org/pq.html

But the article helps. Basically Grover’s is not as potent as Shorr’s. And it seems like everyone is convinced there is no dramatically better quantum algorithm than Grover’s?

Grover's assumes the function is a black box that you cannot look inside and that your only way of finding a certain result is through repeated invocation.

Under this assumption, Grover's is optimal in the number of invocations of the function required to find the result.

However, this assumption may be quite wrong for AES and friends. It may be the structure allows for non brute force attacks that are totally impractical classically but not subject to Grover's optimality limitation quantumly.

The only thing you are guaranteed here is that if you cannot take advantage of structure at all then Grover's is the best you can do.

Given that we have pretty much always found a way to take some advantage of structure, I would bet we will do so here.

That may or may not make it viable to break at all, I just wouldn't bet that it must be treated like a black box forever.

To me that would be a very bad bet.

And, if I’m following you, that’s the key difference in Grover’s and Shorr’s: Shorr’s takes advantage of structure?

I'll explain it without going too far into why any of this is true, which is much more complicated to prove. This will let me use relatively simple math.

Let's say you want to factor N. Pick some number that is coprime to N, which we'll call a, and consider f(x) = a^x (mod N).

Since it's a modular function, it repeats at some point. Shor calculates the period of this function (r), rather than seeing which of the 2^n numbers is "the answer".

Once you know the period of this function, there is a high chance that the factors fall out of gcd(a^(r/2) - 1, N) and gcd(a^(r/2)+1, N).

The point here is not to explain Shor's as much as to point out it is finding a strong amount of structure to take advantage of, quantumly.

This is actually the same way the oracle separation of BQP and the entire polynomial hiearchy works[1] - It depends on forrelation, which is a problem where quantum computers can extract a global property of the function without needing to learn all the individual values, by taking advantage of structure.

Which is why i go to "The idea that there is literally no structure that can be taken advantage of in AES strikes me as a bad bet".

In part because it's already false if you go literature searching. For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00200...

There are already reduced round quantum attacks on AES as well. Again, more to the point, the idea that symmetric key ciphers and cryptographic hashes in general are safe because grover's is slower than shor's is not a thing i would bet on at all. Even if AES ends up relatively safe, that tells you basically nothing about the other practically-used ciphers and functions since there are a lot of different construction mechanisms being used.

[1] People still seem to believe there are no functions which quantum computing models have been been proven to be faster at than classical computing models. This is false. Forrelation is the canonical example - and shows that BQP can perform things exponentially faster than you can classically even given access to an infinite polynomial hierarchy.

It is the current physical actualization of these computing models that have the "is it really faster than classical computers" issue, not the theory ;)

(IE it is a perfect example of "in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, and in practice, there is")

This has nothing to do with SHAttered

And from the other comment, symmetric cryptography is safe too from QC attacks.

So it's apparently as you wrote: it's really only asymmetric crypto that is at risk.

Quantum algorithms require some sort of quantum 'trick' to actually have any speedup over classical computers. The most general quantum trick is Grover's algorithm, which lets you find f⁻¹(x) (given f and x) in sqrt(N) queries rather than N queries, where N is the size of the set from which x is drawn. This cuts the bit security of every algorithm in half, although for things like cryptographic hashes, it really means that a second preimage is now only as 'easy' as finding a collision (due to the birthday attack).

The other really well-known quantum trick is QFT, which allows you to find the period of an unknown periodic function really quickly. This is what allows quantum computers to break asymmetric algorithms based on integer factoring or elliptic curves, since they can both be expressed in terms of the QFT.

Not by a mile. They're even (probably illegally and there's apparently a class action lawsuit oncoming: at least something to that extent was posted on HN today) teaming up, as a duopoly, to push for the same bullshit regulations / "we need to slow down AI research".

The reason they're teaming up is the real competition is, as in many other domains, China.

Great countries, amazing cultures and all cultures are equally good. I personally miss the native south american ones who were torturing kids with stones (for they hadn't discovered the way to transform iron into knives) for as long as possible, to extract as many tears as possible from those kids before they'd eventually die.

All cultures are 100% equivalent. You know, I know it. We all know it.

What do you mean the "first" big? 1929? 2001? 2008?

Do you mean 1929 wasn't a big financial crisis and that, this time, we'll have the first "real" big financial crisis?

I'm confused.

It's honestly very refreshing to have stuff I self-host and be operational without needing 24/7 Internet connection.

I'm running such a setup since years and, IMO, it helps me focus.

I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.

> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."