https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-bq3rc-17e769c
Sometimes in life’s adventure, silence is a gift an enemy gives you when they do not realize the peace and joy you receive from that hostile silence of theirs.
Othertimes, silence is the last thing you want to hear. The term “radio silence” is often used in a case where for whatever reason a response is anticipated which does not seem to want to materialize.
As recently as 50 years ago, the term “internet” was unknown to most of us. We had interchanges of ideas, and interruptions and all kinds of “inters” but no internet connections. If you had mentioned the term to me in the early 80’s i think i might have assumed you meant there was some new way of hooking our fishing nets together in a chain or something.
Here in the future where we live today, it is just about impossible to imagine a world functioning without an internet. Should a catastrophic event or a malicious attack occur, the disruptions to our lives would be profound. (i like understatements). It would arguably be better you be a peasant in a mud hut in mongolia, than to be the ceo of a multinational corporation in a high level apartment in a major city, should a mass long term disruption occur.
One looming threat which isn’t being rehashed let alone hashed much is “quantum computing”. Imagine the outcome if a new development resulted in a system able to crack any password in 2/5ths of a second. The owner of this technology would literally be the king of planet earth. The banking systems of entire countries would swing open for your personal perusal and manipulation. Bitcoin and all of it’s young children would be out on the street. Private wallets would be rendered useless because in order to use the contents for a purchase they would ultimately have to appear online.
To call such a development “disruptive” would be a hilarious understatement. Outflows from all the dammed rivers could be manipulated from a bunker, all over the world. Oh what fun that would be! Virtually all communications could be globally monitored or stopped entirely, so dependent have we become, we internet junkies. Global trade… paralyzed. Electrical grids…. collapsed and forlorn, wires swingly helplessly in the gentle breeze.
And all because we just naturally assumed things would continue as they were, uninterupted. We suffer from normalcy bias; in fact we have a terrible case of it!
And all it took was the development of quantum computing. Here lies the internet; a victim of it’s own success.
Of course, this outcome is not inevitable. Perhaps the development of the internet has reached it’s apex. But there certainly are some concerning indications that tech is outgrowing it’s lederhosen. The latest uproar over deepseek is one example. Also consider how bitcoin miners are able to hunt through various combinations of letters and numbers until the correct combination is hit. Why couldn’t this principle be applied to passwords? Or is it already?
And of course passwords are only as reliable as the people in charge of guarding them. Corporations can be commanded to release passwords through backdoor legislation. If this were not so, how would news channels be able to broadcast the previous private online searches of criminals post-crime?
“your privacy is very very terribly important to us. Nothing is more important to us yeah right” I found it interesting to watch how quickly the bitcoin empire capitulated to new compliance regulations regarding disclosure of personal information. Wasn’t bitcoin supposed to be untraceable and unconfiscateable? Those were the main selling points in fact, were they not? And yet suddenly, my dealer site is asking me for a video of my mug to verify my ownership of 80 bucks worth of the stuff? In all the decades of dealing with banks none have never made such a request!
Sadly, the truth is that most of us have zero clue how electricity flows thru a single light switch, let alone how 50 symbols, numerals and letters lets us check our email, in total privacy yeah right. Let’s ask foochi and hunter how that’s going for them, shall we?
The whole system is standing there like a giant cherry tree, ripe for the picking for the individual or group who masters quantum computing, and for all we know, perhaps this big fat cherry tree is already a pie cooked up and ready to serve piping hot…
Skulltripper 