Distance Learning for fun and profit...
- Thread starter mp3.1415player
- Start date
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- Tags
- worm
Actually it goes farther than QA staking a claim on Taylor - remember how QA is basically taking over the Shard network? Doing little things like hijacking the Endbringers and telling other Shards that the whole "must pursue conflict" psychological drive they enforced on their Parahumans was counter-productive?
QA is basically bribing the Shards that work with her for access to all the data. That doesn't mean those Shards don't have their own drives and goals, however limited they may be. How long do you think it will take before those Shards start replacing their "must pursue conflict" drive with "must befriend Best-Not-Host" and guiding their Parahumans towards Taylor? Especially since it appears very shortly Amy and Vicky's Shards will know exactly who Best-Not-Host is?
(Note I'm assuming they don't know already.. or that they haven't been hijacked by QA. If they don't know or haven't been hijacked, well, it's going to happen soon.)
Itsune
Eldritch horror, Ship's Cat, Emergency Gunner.
- Location
- Somewhere in King County Washington
Are you saying that Amy, and Vicky are QA's attempt at a Health, and Welfare program for "Best Not-Host"?
I'm saying Taylor is about to have an inexplicable charismatic effect on Parahumans.
On the reasonably beneficial side that means those Parahumans will want to do favors for Taylor. (Expect Emma to get a visit from Amy and Amy being seriously tempted to break her "no brains" rule for example.) On the more dangerous side anyone who tries to threaten Best-Not-Host will get the immediate, hostile attention of every Shard that knows who Best-Not-Host is.
Oh, and for bonus points any Shard involves with Best-Not-Host is likely to start getting upgrades they want to try out. Picture the reaction when someone with a very known and noticeable power - say Purity with her helix blasts - suddenly manifests a more powerful and visibly different version of the power.
- Location
- USA
"Case Panacea-Four."
- Location
- Lake superior, Minoc
Eh.. any builder or someone from the trades could have told you this. It's always important to have a good sublayer to put the important piping, wirejobs, Sewer lines etc etc. It's often insulated while at the same time being vented to keep the pressure equal with the surroundings.
While it's going to blow the minds of any Scientists working on her stuff, If Taylor just explained it to some of the doc boys in the trades a few would totally get it. Then tell her to make sure she's using proper safety gear.
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
- Location
- Washington, DC
That would drive Costa-Brown around the bend and over the hill. Plus, make Cauldron more interested in what's happening.
Would love to see that.
Waiting to see what happens next.
Is it bad that I want to see shards like Efficiency and Prototype learn about Taylor and what she's capable of?And it's something that the Shards are fascinated by because they didn't know either...
...and why do I think that Efficiency would squeal like a schoolgirl?
I do love the whole scene about "Oops, we broke all the encryption".
Of course, the true reasons for the paling face isn't just that everyone can read the NSA's mail now (the federal government has the resources to switch to pure paper, or something like one-time pads, which I believe quantum computing really can't crack any easier), it's the fact that Taylor's little widget broke the entire economy.
You know how modern banking works? Credit cards, money transfers, ATMs, ever little way money is moved around and swapped around and handed out and given back? All that relies on encryption Taylor's nifty device broke. (Also the entire internet. And online shopping. Anything having to do with the SSL or relying on certification authorities. But that's peanuts compared to the banks).
Said NSA guy probably called a meeting with everyone and the first action item on the list is "Call all the banks. ALL OF THEM. We need to swap to quantum proof encryption across the board right now". A process that would take years here on Earth-Not-Screwed-By-Space-Whales.
No amount of reading a foreign country's transmissions is worth a fraction of the price of seeing your whole banking system go down irreparably to anyone who gets a hold of that cube. You think your country is gonna handle "Hi guys, we have no idea who owns what or how much money anyone has. According to this every checking account has 1 billion dollars, every savings account is negative 3.4 trillion, and all credit card bills go to the address of Congress. Oh, and everyone is using Bezos' own amazon account now. Oh yeah, your credit cards don't work, ATM's don't work, and neither do cell phones. HOORAY WE'RE SCREWED"
Of course, the true reasons for the paling face isn't just that everyone can read the NSA's mail now (the federal government has the resources to switch to pure paper, or something like one-time pads, which I believe quantum computing really can't crack any easier), it's the fact that Taylor's little widget broke the entire economy.
You know how modern banking works? Credit cards, money transfers, ATMs, ever little way money is moved around and swapped around and handed out and given back? All that relies on encryption Taylor's nifty device broke. (Also the entire internet. And online shopping. Anything having to do with the SSL or relying on certification authorities. But that's peanuts compared to the banks).
Said NSA guy probably called a meeting with everyone and the first action item on the list is "Call all the banks. ALL OF THEM. We need to swap to quantum proof encryption across the board right now". A process that would take years here on Earth-Not-Screwed-By-Space-Whales.
No amount of reading a foreign country's transmissions is worth a fraction of the price of seeing your whole banking system go down irreparably to anyone who gets a hold of that cube. You think your country is gonna handle "Hi guys, we have no idea who owns what or how much money anyone has. According to this every checking account has 1 billion dollars, every savings account is negative 3.4 trillion, and all credit card bills go to the address of Congress. Oh, and everyone is using Bezos' own amazon account now. Oh yeah, your credit cards don't work, ATM's don't work, and neither do cell phones. HOORAY WE'RE SCREWED"
Considering tinkers are a thing; banks should have switched to post-quantum encryption earlier; though said encryption may need scaling up or complete replacement to still be secure given the insane computational power present in one of those cubes.
cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
OTP systems when properly implemented are literally unbreakable. Not unforgable/Malleable but still.
And yes, TLS is now utterly fucked. see my post here:Distance Learning for fun and profit...
EDIT:
Thankfully at the time there should be valid known good(so far to us right now) PQ signatures and key exchanges. They are far more costly and bulky to implement however.
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Jadesteele
Out of my Mind - Back in 5 Minutes
- Location
- half-way between 'Crazy' And 'Eccentric'
Either that, or the first two QA has earmarked for her Harem.
- Location
- On the sofa. (Probably)
Only way to break them is to knock the guy carrying the replacement pad out and copy what he has in his briefcase before waking the guy up and convincing him that a brick fell from the roof and landed on his head and by the way here is your briefcase, bye.
This can be spoiled though by simply giving the guy carrying the pad a base64 string to memorise that decrypts what is in the briefcase so that even if you knock him unconscious it wouldn't help you. There are so many ways to ensure that the transfer is secure these days that the only thing that would work would be to get an inside guy that can spy irl.
Also heard of a system where they use a type of memory stick that can only be read once, so if someone manages to stealthily copy the data the stick will fail when inserted at the destination thus alerting people about the shenanigans.
So of the major interpretations of quantum mechanics, her work shows:
- The Copenhagen interpretation is outright wrong, as her computer draws too much information from "under the hood" to be consistent with it.
- The traditional Many Worlds interpretation is somewhat wrong, as under this interpretation her computer involves the "alternate histories" interacting with each other.
- Hidden variable theories are in general refuted because her computer would require the same hidden variable to hold contradictory values.
- Pilot waves look to be ignored in this particular design, because they either don't exist or aren't useful.
- Nothing so far regarding retrocausal interpretations, where quantum information travels in both directions in time but can't be classically interpreted until after it's sent.
hance1986
The One Above All.
I didn't pick it up before. Does Taylor now have a artificial link to the Queen Administrator meaning she can use canon abilities now that Skitter had?
Another interesting thing is if this is a 2 way street link, is QA getting data on humans and Earth in an on the ground level? Kind of different from impersonal and removed shard connections to understand a host species.
I'm honestly betting the process that would indeed take years here on this Earth will take weeks on Earth-Fucking-Tinkers-and-Thinkers Bet.
I'll lay extremely good odds that Tinkers and Thinkers very very quickly found and exploited the flaws in 80's and 90's encryption and crypto hashing - and there were many. This should have led to protocols that are designed to swap algorithms quickly and easily, because there would have been a very rapid cycle of crypto enhancement, breaking the enchancement, crpto enhancement, and so on and so on which would have slowed down but not entirely stopped.
"Why should his signature matter? He's not a cape! Not even a parahuman!"
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General Brass: "Why didn't you tell anyone you'd figured this out?"Taylor has documented how the gravitational reference generators interact with quantum foam, and draw most of their energy from there. Admittedly this is in theoretical calculations that probably about six people on the planet other than her can actually properly understand, but it's in the documentation
The computing crystals, as documented by her, heavily leverage quantum physics and parallel world theory. This isn't unknown to the science community as they have positive proof of parallel worlds via Earth Aleph, and much of the existing hypotheses on how Parahuman abilities work is based on such concepts.
Subspace is a layer below quantum foam. That part she's not really mentioned yet. The computing hardware can be, and has been, explained in more traditional ways as massive-scale quantum computing. The impossibly low energy requirements are due to this.
She hasn't mentioned to anyone yet that there is a layer of Reality below the quantum level, that she has positive proof of this, that she entirely on her own worked out the existence of this, then figured out how to use it for communications among many other things. That part is still her personal playground
And it's something that the Shards are fascinated by because they didn't know either...
Taylor: "Hey, I gave you everything you needed to understand two levels of reality - you can let me look into this one myself without getting all greedy. You're still working on the previous two."
General Brass: "You should have told us, Ms Hebert."
Taylor: "You do realise I'm also the only person who can do anything with it at the moment, right?"
Angus: "She's also the one who'd have to write any notes for us to be able to get the basics."
General Brass: "Don't you have any experts in this?"
Angus: "General, you're talking to our expert."
General Brass: "Any other experts?"
Angus: "General, we have plenty of people who have begun to get a solid understanding of the prior bits. But every bit of that is based on Ms Hebert's notes that she hands over when she's ready to."
General Brass: "But if they've got her notes, can't they take over?"
Angus: "You do realize that you're literally asking for us to understand notes on levels of physics we didn't know existed that are still to be written by the only person who actually knows enough to provide them."
General Brass: "Well, order her to write them now."
Taylor: "I'm gonna go get a Burrito and watch a movie." *Gets up and leaves.*
Angus: "She's gonna go get a burrito and watch a movie now, and the President himself isn't dumb enough to try and give her that order without a really good reason. Even then, it'd only be a strong suggestion."
General Brass: "Can't you order her?"
Angus: "She has basically moved us to Star Trek level technology mostly on the basis of just doing whatever interests her at the moment. We've stopped trying to order or even vaguely encourage a specific research direction. We just let her do her thing in her own time, supply the snack foods and say thank you when she hands us stuff. If you want, I can get a presidential order signed to say that's our official research policy."
General Brass: "You're basing our entire military research policy on what a teenager wants to do."
Angus: "Seems to be working out pretty well, doesn't it? Maybe you should assume we've got our reasons for doing it this way."
cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
Note that I said properly implemented. You would not be carrying a note, instead you would
- Using a hardened HSM that has it's volatile memory purged and "deletes" the key when tampered with and that is in a tamperproof and tamper evident case(See PUF).
- Key on the HSM has to be further decrypted with another key.
- Said key has to be recreated from a bunch of people's passwords.
- And you don't send one person with the key. You send it with multiple people via independent mechanisms and travel paths that are independent on one another.
- And the known uncompromised keys have to be xored together to recreate the OTP. Send the indexes of the subkeys to the other side(who has a copy of all of the subkeys) to generate the full true OTP key. Any potentially compromised subkey like your scenario there will not be included.
Nope. Not enough. See above.
DM me for further implementation details.
- Location
- USA
General Brass: "This is nonsense! We are the US government and we will not be treated this way by some bratty teenager!"
Angus: "First off, as Tonto once told the Lone Ranger what do you mean we, white man? Second off, there are appoximately 50 generals in the US military with sufficient rank, experience, and specialized credentials to replace you at need. Do you know how many people on Earth are qualified to even partially replace the Prime Asset? Zero. Literally everyone else in this project is more expendable than she is."
General Brass: "Are you saying that I would be relieved just to pacify some teenager? Ridiculous!"
Angus: "... how did you not see the copy of the Evacuation Order for the Prime Asset that specifically states she's the number one force protection priority for the Secret Service, demoting the President himself to number two? It's literally the cover sheet on her personnel file!"
General Brass: *incoherent squeaking noise*
Angus: (pulling out his cell phone) "Fuck it, I'm calling the Joint Chiefs right now to get you relieved on the grounds of 'You were stupid enough to take command of this project without even reading the President's standing orders first.' Pack your shit."
General Brass: "I- clearly, there has been a miscommunication-"
Angus: "Nope, too late, pack your shit. But on your way out, could you do me a solid and fetch me Taylor's personnel file? Obviously we need to stamp her operational priority on the outer cover, and in BIG RED LETTERS this time."
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Good lord, you have room temperature superconductors, anti-grav drives, gravitational sheer shielding, and optical computers. Oh, and apparently a reactionless drive given her first anti-grav device shot off at 1g. Why would you complain?
You've made access to the entire solar system free as the cost to LEO is...basically nothing. You could slap anti-grav drives on submarines and be tooling around blasting the Star Trek theme song around Mars right now (well, except for Simmy). And laughing at radiation, because of your room temperature superconductors. And laughing at half the engineering problems of space as suddenly you have one-g in whatever direction you want. Goodbye bone density problems! Goodbye stupid "oh wait, heat doesn't rise in space" problems! Stuff works like your engineers assume, at least inside the ship, instead of needing painful experience to remind you stuff's different in zero-G.
Oh, and you don't even have to BOTHER to go into orbit to do fun things with zero-gravity production, you can make zero-g bubbles in your backyard and experiement with metallurgy and crystals and god knows what else while drinking craft beer.
Your gravity control probably means you can do fusion the easy way (ie: let's just use gravity to condense all that hydrogen down real tight, like it's a real star!) and if you don't you have room-temperature superconductors, so energy is sorted. (And that's assuming I'm not forgetting Taylor solving fusion earlier. She probably did).
Anyone who complained about their methodology should be demoted to private and removed from the military for gross stupidity.
If Taylor Hebert popped into America today, and asked for 10 trillion dollars in return for her reference frame drive and it's accompanying notes, the US Government would simply ask "How would you like to be paid?" and consider it the deal of the millennia.
(Which is why DARPA on Earth-Bet is now "The Taylor Hebert Science Fan Club". They don't have to pay ten trillion dollars, they just have to give a teenager a great life and let her do whatever the hell she feels like, because she paid for a 1000 years of such treatment with her first paper).
- Location
- Wonderland
3. Administrator to Queen's rank four(!)♕
I think it's less "they aren't thinking about a sublayer like that" and more "they thought the quantum foam was the bottom sublayer."
Taylor pretty much just inside jobbed the entire Shard network and there's absolutely Jack squat that an entity could do to kick her out short of killing her.
- Location
- USA
For a real-life historical example, most of the cryptographic officers in World War II who were involved in breaking the Japanese naval ciphers would have never been allowed on the base, let alone into highly sensitive positions, during the peacetime military. Virtually none of them could remotely obey regulations, and some of them couldn't even pass the psych evals. We're talking 'forgot to wear pants today' levels of "eccentric" genius, or so the fleet folklore has told me.
But hey, the US Navy really needed the project they were working on to actually work, and they were the only mathematicians available for the job, so Pacific Fleet HQ put up with their raving lunacy and liked it. They only got quietly retired after the war was over and their services were no longer irreplaceable.
And the stories they tell about the Bletchley Park codebreakers in England during WWII? Even crazier.
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She bypassed it entirely; direct quantum/subspace (I forgot which) taps are basically unlimited free energy in a way all those stupid over-unity devices can only dream of. When he says her phone has really great battery life she is not kidding.
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