Just curious if anybody knows why a quantum computer wouldn’t be ideal for this task?
Because they are not really practical until now. As far as I know the problem is that the current generation of quantum computers has way to few qubits to crack something like a 4096bit RSA key. So even if they wanted, they can’t. Quantum computers are an important field of research and can solve a limited set of problems well, but they are not really ready for an open market. I am no expert on this field though, this is just what I deduce from the things I read about the technology.
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Even if the government doesn’t (and they shouldn’t, they should do as few and little things as possible), other owners of quantum computers should be up for the task. I think Google, IBM and however else have quantum computers just haven’t thought of monetizing them, it’s currently just research. I’m pretty sure once it’s ready (if it isn’t already and we’re not being told), they will first do government contracts and crack really high-profile encrypted communications for nation states and maybe some already captured packets that the alphabet soups are holding in their humongous data centers (they collect everything even if they can’t currently decrypt the data). After that, when it gets just a little more easy to manufacture, but still in the realm of early adoption, they might show it to the world like “hey, don’t pay millions or even hundred of thousands for the ransom, pay us a few $2000 bucks and we’ll find your decryption key for you.”
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If a government could use quantum computing to trivially decrypt stuff then I’m pretty sure some ramsomware would be the least of our worries.
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government? no. they already assume to much power as it is.
but that being said they should set up a way and make publicly accessible if its of use.
so if your infected you can connect to the quantum computer and have the infection killed (assuming it works that way).
but other than that government shouldn’t really be involved unless its there infrastructure thats being affected.
best thing to do though is keep patching, and catch the badguys doing this.
Honestly, the Government Might be working on stuff like this, but the tech would be kept secret, so they would not tell us. More likely, the quantum tech they Are* working in would be going to crack comms and existing crypt they are already investigating.
As in, intelligence gathering, rather than helping people
*If they have a quantum computer project, (And the justification for developing one in secret is pretty high…)
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I favour the government sending in specialists to deal with the gangs one way or another.
It’s also a bit of a misnomer that quantum machines will be exponentially faster at everything compared to today. At some things some things they will be. Others not so much. 256bit AES is already quantum resistant, and other algorithms are also. Quantum machines just have different complexity classes compared to machines we use today.
I find it funny the “learn how to program quantum computers” books I see popping up on amazon and other places. Is there something I’m missing here about how that’s supposed to work? 
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