If you’re a tech and/or space nut, there was some important news from China overnight.
Actually, from the Gobi desert in northern China, where China sent into orbit the world’s first quantum-communications satellite from a launch center in Inner Mongolia.
Not just any satellite, as The Guardian explains it this is “a project Beijing hopes will enable it to build a a coveted ‘hack-proof’ communications system with potentially significant military and commercial applications.”
The Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, or Quess, is part of an ambitious space program that has accelerted since Xi Jinping became Communist party chief in late 2012, explained The Guardian’s Tom Phillips.
The satellite will send secure messages between Beijing and Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in far west China. The idea is to build a “hack-proof” communications network based on the scientific principle of entanglement. But the push seems to be as much one into the realm of physics as it is into cyberdefense.
Why quantum computing?
Gregoir Ribordy, co-founder of Geneva-based quantum cryptography firm ID Quantique, explained in The Wall Street Journal that quantum encryption is secure against any kind of computing power because information encoded in a quantum particle is destroyed as soon as it is measured, likening it to sending a message written on a soap bubble.
“If someone tries to intercept it when it’s being transmitted, by touching it, they make it burst.”
The new satellite was named “Micius,” after the fifth century B.C. Chinese scientist who discovered that light travels in straight lines more than 2,000 years ago, and who opposed offensive warfare.
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