Dachannien Ars Scholae Palatinae
16y
1,130
Subscriptor
OrvGull said:
Google has a quantum computing division. Implying they're close to some kind of breakthrough could absolutely juice their stock.
Maybe, but they actually explain the point in worrying now: Store-now-decrypt-later attacks can only really be mitigated by migrating systems to PQC. The sooner you do that, the smaller your data vulnerability surface is (in a timewise sense). If you get compromised in the future and your encrypted data gets exfiltrated, you're much better off if that data was protected with PQC. Your future vulnerability without PQC is by definition shorter if you implement now rather than later.

Based on that logic, the reason to pick, say, 2029 as a good must-implement date is because of the naturally decaying value of store-now-decrypt-later data. Even if QC isn't successful until 2039, deploying by 2029 means any vulnerable data would be 10 years old (and 10 years less valuable) by the time it gets cracked. The fact that they didn't pick a date even sooner just speaks to the monumental bulk of the task at hand.

It’s amazing how far school buses have come in over a century. In the late 1800s, a school bus was barely more than a covered wagon. Today, it’s a big, yellow beast that dutifully serves school districts for decades while safely carrying millions of students every single day. So much of it is thanks to those standards set in the 1930s, including those seemingly random black rails.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday announced it will no longer approve consumer-grade routers made outside of the US, citing a President Trump directive on reducing the use of foreign technology for national security reasons. The action will prevent foreign-made routers from being imported into or sold in the US.

Routers already approved for sale in the US can continue to be sold, and consumers can keep using any router they’ve previously obtained, the FCC said. But the FCC will not approve new device models made at least partly outside the US unless the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security determines that the router does not pose national security risks.

The prohibition applies to both US and foreign companies that produce routers outside the US. Foreign production includes “any major stage of the process through which the device is made, including manufacturing, assembly, design, and development.”

“This action means that new models of foreign-produced routers will no longer be eligible for marketing or sale in the US,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote on X.

The story of Iomega is one of genuine engineering innovation and the fickle nature of consumer technology. As with so many other juggernauts of its era, Iomega was eventually brought down by a new technology that simply wasn’t practical to counter.

Recycling solar panels is challenging and expensive. It costs $30 to recycle a solar panel, to recover between $3 and $8 worth of minerals, metal, and glass. By contrast, it costs approximately $1 per panel to ship used panels to a landfill, and slightly more to ship inefficient used panels for reuse in developing countries overseas, shifting the waste problems elsewhere.

Because of the economics, less than one in 10 solar panels is recycled. With millions more panels being installed each year, the problem is growing, as was recently recognized in studies published by the London School of Economics in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). //

“Panels are delicate, bulky pieces of equipment usually installed on rooftops in the residential context [with] [s]pecialized labor . . . required to detach and remove them, lest they shatter to smithereens before they make it onto the truck,” writes HBR. “In addition, some governments may classify solar panels as hazardous waste, due to the small amounts of heavy metals (cadmium, lead, etc.) they contain [resulting in] . . . expensive restrictions—hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.” //

It costs $440,000 to $675,000 per unit to decommission and dispose of each onshore wind turbine from base to blade. Dismantling offshore wind turbines is even more expensive, topping $1 million per turbine. The value of the material from the towers and gear boxes is about $28,000 per unit, far less than a 10th of the cost of dismantling. As a result, the metal, gears, concrete, and other materials often end up in landfills, as do the composite blades after they’ve been crushed at great expense and with large emissions of carbon dioxide from the machinery used to haul and crush them. //

“A separate tractor-trailer is needed to haul each blade to a landfill, and cutting them up requires powerful specialized equipment,” Flanakin wrote. “With some 8,000 blades a year already being removed from service just in the United States, that’s 32,000 truckloads over the next four years; in a few years, the numbers will be five times higher.

“Over the next 20 years, the U.S. alone could have to dispose of 720,000 tons of waste blade material,” said Flanakin. “Yet a 2018 report predicted a 15% drop in U.S. landfill capacity by 2021, with only some 15 years’ capacity remaining [meaning] [w]e will have to permit entirely new landfills simply to handle wind turbine waste—on top of mountains of solar and battery waste.”

Not every landfill is certified to handle wind or solar waste, and many have decided to refuse to do so because it demands too much space. //

Government subsidies and mandates created the renewable waste problem. The solution is not more expensive, misguided government mandates or subsidies, but ending wind and solar incentives and mandates, which are responsible for the huge waste stream.