In 2017, I had stumbled on an issue with Facebook: while you are entering your password, adding a superfluous extra character at the end of the password would STILL allow you to login to https://Facebook.com.
I’m not a I’m not a quantum physicist, nor a computer scientist. But Microsoft released this video a few months ago which sparked a thought.
While they were quick to point out the obvious benefits of “teleporting” the quantum state, i.e. the computational results, from one pair of entangled qubits to another.
This quickly begged the question: given the hyper-advanced nature of supply chain attacks (see Israel planting explosives in the pagers of Hezbollah operatives, recently), could a nation-state simply take entangled qubits of an adversary’s quantum computer and see what it is they are working on at any given time? Further, could communications networks be compromised for real time ‘eavesdropping,’ so to speak? Perhaps not even internationally, but perhaps in an intelligence gathering platform akin to the NSA’s own PRISM program? If there is, according to some theories, no limit to the number of particles that share an entangled state, nobody would know if you simply “cloned” a few more, right?
Am I understanding that well enough? Or would it not be the Qubits that become entangled, and only the ‘data’ that flows through them?
I’m not the person to write the research paper on this topic. But I certainly hope someone out there will produce it – because I would love to read through it. Just an interesting thought I had with an eye on the future. Whether that future is 20 years, 50 years, or even further out is another question.
We have an Ubuntu based mini computer at which serves as little more than a network switch. CPU and other resource utilization should be next to nothing, but frequently this computer would have CPU temperatures around 80 degrees Celsius, and when you would watch the resource monitor the CPU activity was all over the place. Despite the computer only really showing a few percent of CPU usage, if you went toe the Resources Tab of System Monitor, the per-core CPU activity was all over the place.
As I mentioned, the computer in question is a simple network appliance that would never need to print, and upon closer inspection, it was the Linux “CUPS” Service. Once we disabled that, the CPU settled right down.
A co-worker came to me recently because they had an Ubuntu Linux 22.04 computer on which restored a “Timeshift” backup, but suddenly Firefox wasn’t working. How or why it became corrupted was beyond me, but by the time I was ‘called in’ he had already tried several troubleshooting techniques, which had only seemed to make things worse. He had tried resetting, removing, and purging Firefox, and as other errors popped up they became things like cannot locate base snap core 22, or something about an inability to run certain hooks. I honestly didn’t even get a shot of the error message, but the good news was, that I had a fix.
The simple fix for this is to have your core runtime environment (the Core 22 base snap, or Core 20, or any other core you may be having this issue with) switch over to the beta branch, and then immediately switch it back to the production / stable branch. Two quick commands will take care of this:
sudo snap refresh --beta core22
sudo snap refresh --stable core22Once finished, you can simply reinstall your problem snap: sudo snap install firefox – and then it began redownloading and reinstalling correctly.