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hubie writes:

Hydrogen atmosphere could keep exomoons habitable for billions of years:

Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating – that is to say, for almost as long as the Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.

Planetary systems often form under unstable conditions. If young planets come too close, they can fling each other out of their orbits. This creates free-floating planets (FFPs), which wander through the galaxy without a parent star. An earlier study by LMU physicist Dr. Giulia Roccetti had shown that gas giants ejected in this way do not necessarily lose all of their moons in the process.

The ejection does, however, alter the orbits of the moons. They become highly elliptical, such that their distance from the planet constantly changes. The resulting tidal forces rhythmically deform the lunar body, compress its interior, and generate heat through friction. This tidal heating can be sufficient to maintain oceans of liquid water on the surface – even without the energy of a star, and in the cold of interstellar space.

Journal Reference: David Dahlbüdding, Tommaso Grassi, Karan Molaverdikhani, Giulia Roccetti, Barbara Ercolano, Dieter Braun, Paola Caselli. Habitability of Tidally Heated H2-Dominated Exomoons around Free-Floating Planets. In: MNRAS 2026

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Smart ceramics reveal a new way to control heat transfer, boosting thermal conductivity nearly threefold:

New research from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with The Ohio State University and Amphenol Corporation, challenges conventional understanding about controlling heat flow in solid materials.

The study, published in PRX Energy, shows that applying an electric field to a ceramic material changes how phonons (tiny vibrations that carry heat) behave. Phonons with atoms moving along the field direction (poling direction) last longer than those with atoms moving perpendicular to the field. As a result, the material conducts heat almost three times more efficiently along the field direction than in perpendicular directions. This promising approach could lead to new solid-state devices that control heat flow in everyday technologies.

"Being able to control both how fast and in what manner heat flows could lead to devices that manage thermal energy far more efficiently," said Puspa Upreti, an ORNL postdoctoral research associate.

Controlling heat flow is important for high-performance systems such as modern electronic coolers with no moving parts, energy converters that change heat into power, chip-based circuits used in everyday technology, and cogeneration systems, which capture and repurpose industrial heat. Regulating heat in these systems creates the right conditions for peak efficiency and performance.

The link between efficiency and heat flow is shown by the Carnot cycle, an idealized model of a heat engine that sets the highest possible efficiency by precisely controlling the transfer of heat between hot and cold reservoirs. In this study, applying an electric field removes barriers to phonon transport. This lets the vibrations travel farther, much like reducing traffic on a busy road, and improves heat conduction along the electric field direction, which leads to better efficiency.

[...] The study focused on a special type of ceramic called relaxor-based ferroelectrics. When these ceramics are exposed to an electric field, tiny electrical charges inside them align. This alignment reduces scattering of the heat-carrying vibrations, allowing energy to flow more efficiently. The crystals used in this study were carefully grown and then subjected to the electric field, or "poled," by Raffi Sahul at Amphenol Corporation. The work produced solids that enable precise control of energy flow.

[...] By integrating their thermal conductivity measurements with neutron scattering data, the researchers directly connected changes in heat flow to the behavior of atomic vibrations within the crystal. The late Professor Joseph Heremans of Ohio State designed the thermal conductivity experiments and guided doctoral candidate Delaram Rashadfar through the data interpretation. "While earlier work led us to expect only a modest effect, observing a threefold difference turned out to be a significant result," said Rashadfar. "Professor Heremans always stressed the importance of trusting the data first and letting the theory follow."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1103/5d1z-wg4p

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/federal-surveillance-tech-becomes-mandatory-161321992.html

Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, requires NHTSA to finalize rules forcing all new passenger vehicles to include "advanced impaired driving prevention technology": infrared cameras and sensors which perform a constant biometric assessment of driver alertness and sobriety.

The tech involves infrared cameras mounted on steering columns or A-pillars, tracking eye movement, pupil dilation, and drowsiness patterns. Your car watches and decides whether you're fit to drive.

Timeline for Implementation

The surveillance rollout targets late 2026 to 2027 for all new passenger vehicles.

While NHTSA's final rule faced delays beyond the November 2024 deadline, automakers will still get 2-3 years for full implementation once regulations are finalized.

The timing coincides with broader automotive software integration, making these systems potentially updatable through over-the-air patches—expanding monitoring capabilities post-purchase.

-----

My deepest apologies to the world for any small part I may have played in this development. In 2012 I submitted an "idea" paper to an anonymous solicitor asking for ways to better integrate smartphones with in-vehicle systems. In that paper (which I wrote carelessly off the top of my head) I suggested that automobiles should abandon the then current practice of using under-powered embedded systems and instead install a desktop level capability computer utilizing standard development tools. I also pointed out the ability of such a system to use OpenCV to perform this kind of monitoring as an opt-in, or parental control type of system - not really thinking through the (not obvious at the time) future of insurance and federally mandated continuous monitoring of all drivers (as Elmo has already demonstrated broad popular compliance with in his Tesla products...) They awarded me 3rd place in the competiton and sent me a check for $2000, which came at a very good time for the family - having been laid off in the post-Afghanistan pullout techonomic upheaval. I'm sure I'm not the only one to point out these things around that time...

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

An Apple-backed trade group prematurely published a press release on April 12th praising a yet-to-be-introduced Senate bill, raising questions about coordination between Big Tech companies and lawmakers on child safety legislation:

[...] "The Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA), sponsored by Sens. Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), offers a pragmatic, security-first approach by imposing the requirement to receive age information only on apps that provide differentiated experiences for children and adults, like social media apps or adult-only apps," the now-deleted press release stated.

The bill is expected to be introduced on Wednesday (4/22), according to a release from Moran's office,

"Sen. Moran's office is not aware or involved in any trade organization publishing and then removing a release related to Parents Over Platforms Act," a spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The App Association, which receives substantial funding from Apple, launched a lobbying campaign in February to support the bill with advertisements. Apple and Google have additionally lobbied in support of POPA, spending millions on related efforts in recent disclosures.

Apple did not respond to requests for comment from the DCNF.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://itsfoss.com/news/tuta-drive-closed-beta/

Privacy in 2026 is a bit of a joke. Governments have turned surveillance into standard operating procedure, and Big Tech companies treat your personal data like a free-for-all buffet, helping themselves, then selling the leftovers to data brokers who do the same.

That's pushed people toward privacy-first alternatives, and quite a few companies have stepped up to meet that demand. Tuta is one of the more recognizable names in that space, offering encrypted mail and calendar services to over 10 million users worldwide.

Now, the company is looking to round out its ecosystem with the one piece that's been missing, an encrypted cloud storage solution.

Tuta first laid the groundwork for this back in July 2023, when it announced the PQDrive project with backing from the German government. The initiative had received €1.5 million in funding through the KMU-innovativ program, a grant scheme that supports small and medium enterprises in research and development.

The goal was clear from the very beginning. It was to build a cloud storage service secured with post-quantum encryption, not just conventional algorithms.

To get there, Tuta partnered with the University of Wuppertal, which handled key research tasks including testing cryptographic algorithms and figuring out how to deduplicate encrypted data without punching holes in the security model.

All that effort has now produced a product ready for real-world testing. Starting today, Tuta Drive enters closed beta, with select users receiving early access to put it through its paces ahead of a public release.

It is an end-to-end encrypted cloud storage service that fits directly into Tuta's existing ecosystem alongside mail and calendar. Everything you store gets encrypted without any action needed on your end, and the zero-knowledge architecture means Tuta has no technical ability to read your files or share them with anyone else.

The encryption underpinning Drive is the same TutaCrypt protocol Tuta already uses for its mail service. It combines classical and quantum-resistant algorithms in a hybrid approach, so even if a quantum computer cracks one layer down the line, it still has to contend with the other.

And, the service is hosted in Germany, which brings strict GDPR protections into play on top of the technical safeguards.

Arne Möhle, CEO of Tuta, announced this by commenting that:

        With Tuta Drive, we are taking the next step towards offering a full private digital workspace.

        Today, more than ten million citizens and businesses, including journalists, whistleblowers and activists use Tuta Mail as an alternative to insecure email offered by mainstream providers.

        Adding an encrypted cloud storage to Tuta will enable them to also store their files securely.

"c0lo" writes:

The practice impacts consumers beyond the grocery store. Car dealerships can be dynamic pricing traps, too, the FTC said last year:

Your favorite online grocer or retail store might be secretly raising prices on you - and one state has had enough.

Maryland lawmakers approved a bill earlier this month that will ban surveillance pricing: the practice of raising individualized prices online, based on a shopper's habits and personal information. The practice can cost shoppers as much as $1,200 a year, a study from consumer watchdog Consumer Reports found last year.

The bill is likely to become law in Maryland later this month when Governor Wes Moore signs it. His signature is all but guaranteed after Moore said in an April 14 social media post that he "can't wait to sign it."

Titled, "Protection From Predatory Pricing Act," it includes a ban on grocery stores and third-party partners from using an individual's personal information and other data to set a price. If passed, it would be the first law of its kind in the country.

Surveillance pricing uses a shopper's personal information, past purchases, cart activity and, in some cases, protected data such as gender to raise prices as far as they can without losing the customer. That can lead to higher prices for the same product for different consumers.

Surveillance pricing has become widespread in the last few years, and can increase a company's profits by up to 4 percent, a 2025 Federal Trade Commission study found.

The practice impacts consumers beyond the grocery store. Car dealerships can be dynamic pricing traps, too, the commission said.

"A car could potentially be segmented as a 'first-time car buyer' by the dealership using these tools, inferring that [the] shopper might be less savvy about the options available and be promoted particular financing rates, trade-in discounts, or maintenance products," the commission wrote.

Translation: a company can use your personal info to shape how it pitches lending options, discounts and optional vehicle features.

Maryland isn't the only state taking on surveillance pricing.

New York passed a law in November 2025 requiring retailers to tell customers when they're using AI or personal information to set prices. A bill submitted to New York's state legislature in January would ban surveillance pricing altogether, but it has yet to make it past the early stages of the lawmaking process.

In January 2026, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into how businesses use surveillance pricing and whether it violates the state's consumer protection laws.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

It adds to the body of evidence that the Red Planet once contained the building blocks of life:

The search for signs of life on Mars continues to yield promising data. A first-of-its-kind wet chemistry experiment, published Tuesday in Nature, confirmed the presence of essential ingredients of life preserved in ancient Martian sandstones.

The molecules were found inside 3.5-billion-year-old sandstone. NASA's Curiosity rover collected the clay-filled rocks from an area called Glen Torridon, inside Mars' enormous Gale Crater. The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) mobile instrument suite analyzed the data.

The experiment was unique as the first off-Earth study to use the chemical tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH). The reagent allows Curiosity to break down larger organic molecules on the Martian surface, reducing them to something the rover's instruments can read.

It revealed the presence of over 20 different organic molecules. Among the data was confirmation of naphthalene and benzothiophene, some of the largest and most complex organic compounds discovered on the Red Planet. The experiment also yielded the first detection of a possible N-heterocycles, which DNA and RNA are built upon.

“That detection is pretty profound because these structures can be chemical precursors to more complex nitrogen-bearing molecules,” the paper’s lead author, Amy Williams, wrote in NASA’s announcement. “Nitrogen heterocycles have never been found before on the Martian surface or confirmed in Martian meteorites.”

As with previous discoveries of organic material on Mars, this one is not yet the smoking gun we've been waiting for. But it adds to a growing body of evidence that, at a minimum, the foundations of life as we know it were present on an ancient version of the planet. The study also confirms that organic material can survive on Mars for billions of years, which will encourage future experiments.

The paper's authors say the data will help NASA to optimize its second (and final) TMAH experiment on Curiosity. It also opens the door to future TMAH tests on the Rosalind Franklin Mars rover and the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon, Titan. Both missions are scheduled for 2028 at the earliest.

Journal Reference: Williams, A.J., Eigenbrode, J.L., Millan, M. et al. Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment. Nat Commun 17, 2748 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70656-0

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The influencers claim that products such as patches, gums and pouches utilize the 'natural' product and that it has been unfairly condemned by the medical establishment:

Multiple influencers who are supporters of Robert F Kennedy Jr's Make America Healthy Again movement are pushing a new and somewhat surprising health hack to their followers – nicotine.

The influencers claim that products such as patches, gums and pouches utilize the "natural" product and that it has been unfairly condemned by the medical establishment,

Nicotine pouches entered the U.S. market in 2016, and scientists are still learning about the short and long-term effects of the products, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"There are no safe tobacco products, including nicotine pouches. This is particularly true for youth, young adults, and women who are pregnant," the CDC website states.

"Youth, young adults, and women who are pregnant should not use nicotine pouches. People who do not currently use tobacco products, including nicotine pouches, should not start."

The center notes that nicotine can harm brain development, which continues up until the age of 25, as well as increasing the risk for young people of future addiction to other drugs. Symptoms of addiction can start "quickly" even if the person has not used nicotine products previously.

"Nicotine can also increase blood pressure and heart rate, which could, over time, raise the risk of heart disease; the compound may also harden the walls of arteries in the heart, which can lead to heart attacks. Nicotine can also exacerbate existing heart conditions, according to the CDC.

This has not deterred the MAHA influencers, who argue that nicotine has been vilified in a similar way to peptides, raw milk and beef tallow – which has been promoted by Kennedy. The U.S. Health Secretary himself has been pictured carrying around a tin of nicotine pouches, and has said previously that such pouches are "probably" the safest way to consume nicotine.

[...] Medical experts are united in their condemnation of such promotions.

"If there really was a health benefit for nicotine, then the medical community would be recommending it to their patients," Doctor Adam Leventhal, director of the Institute for Addiction Science at the University of Southern California, told The New York Times.

"And what's happening is the opposite."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Gold-based substrates create major cost barriers for mass production:

The team from the Institute of Metal Research reengineered the chemical vapor deposition process by introducing a liquid gold and tungsten bilayer as the substrate.

For decades, Moore's Law predicted a doubling of computing power roughly every two years - but as transistor dimensions approach atomic scales, quantum effects and heat dissipation are making further miniaturization increasingly difficult.

2D semiconductors have emerged as a leading candidate for post-Moore chip materials, as the rising workloads from AI tools and large language models are pushing current chip architectures to their limits.

Modern transistor architectures depend on the complementary pairing of n-type and p-type materials.

The shortage of high-performance p-type options has become a major constraint for next-generation chip design, as while many n-type 2D semiconductors are well established, achieving stable p-type counterparts remains a challenge.

"The lack of high performance p-type materials has become a critical bottleneck for the development of sub-5 nanometer node 2D semiconductors," said Zhu Mengjian from the National University of Defense Technology.

The monolayer tungsten silicon nitride films combine several key advantages for advanced transistor design.

These include strong hole mobility, high on-state current density, mechanical strength, efficient heat dissipation, and chemical stability.

The method expands single-crystal domains to sub-millimeter sizes and increases production speed from approximately 0.00004 inches over five hours to about 0.0008 inches per minute.

This represents an increase of around 1,000x compared to conventional approaches.

The research represents progress in 2D semiconductor manufacturing, but the gap between growing centimeter-scale films in a lab and mass-producing defect-free wafers remains enormous.

The gold-based substrate, while effective for research, would be prohibitively expensive for high-volume production.

China's ambition to leapfrog existing semiconductor limitations is understandable, and this study is a breakthrough.

Unfortunately, the industry has seen many promising 2D materials fail to transition from academic papers to fabrication plants.

Whether this material follows the same path will depend on solving the scalability and cost challenges that have doomed previous options.

Via Interesting Engineering

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

What makes a person keep playing a video slot machine? Some of the same features that make children stay on social media apps or video games for too long:

In two landmark cases, social media companies have been found liable for endangering and harming children. Meta and Google are appealing the verdicts and disputing the idea that their products are addictive. But over the course of more than a decade, scientists have identified key features of social media and other apps meant to hold children's attention for as long as possible.

These features create a kind of superglue on the apps, says cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll at New York University, who has pioneered research in this field. "They keep us spending more time on these apps and spending more money. They drain us of our energy and ourselves." Understanding these features offers parents a rubric for evaluating how harmful an app or device may be for kids, Schüll says.

During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like "digital casinos." That's an apt comparison, according to Schüll's research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the casino industry gradually and purposely created what many scientists consider to be the most addictive form of gambling: video slot machines. They are something like a giant app, played on a huge video screen with an ergonomic chair attached to it.

People struggling with gambling addiction often cite video slots as their game of choice, studies have found. Some people gamble on these machines for extraordinary periods of time, Schüll found in her ethnographic fieldwork. They can play for 24 hours, even 48 hours straight. Some people even told Schüll that they wear adult diapers to the casino so they don't have to stop gambling to use the restroom.

[...] Through her research, she uncovered four key features that, when combined together, help hold people on the gambling devices. These features trigger a trancelike or dissociative state, known as a "machine zone" or "dark flow," in which people lose track of their sense of time and place.

To Schüll's surprise, around the early 2010s, the same features began to appear on phone and tablet apps, including social media, games and video-streaming platforms. "These are not normal products for kids like a pair of shoes or a toy," she says. "They create a relationship with kids."

Here are four features that create that superglue:

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: Anthropocene Magazine

Scientists have engineered a water-soluble pyrimidone molecule that captures solar heat and releases it days or weeks later—enough to boil water on demand.

There are several technologies out there that harvest the sun's boundless energy. Solar panels soak up solar energy and convert it to electricity, while solar thermal systems use mirror-like contraptions to collect sunshine to heat water or living spaces. But there aren't any efficient ways to store solar heat for days or weeks.

Now, researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara have come up with a way to do that. They have created a new engineered molecule that traps sunlight, stores the energy in its chemical bonds, and then releases it on demand. The team reported this rechargeable solar heat battery in a paper published in the journal Science.

"Think of photochromic sunglasses," said Han Nguyen, a PhD student and the paper's lead author in a press release . "When you're inside, they're just clear lenses. You walk out into the sun, and they darken on their own. Come back inside, and the lenses become clear again. That kind of reversible change is what we're interested in. Only instead of changing color, we want to use the same idea to store energy, release it when we need it, and then reuse the material over and over."

The new material, called a pyrimidone, can store more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram. That is almost double the energy density of a conventional lithium-ion battery, which is about 0.9 MJ/kg. Just like a lithium-ion battery can store electricity for days, the new liquid battery could store sunshine for days to provide hot water or heat when needed.

Molecular solar thermal energy storage in Dewar pyrimidone beyond 1.6 megajoules per kilogram

Original Submission

"c0lo" writes:

Governments want to move away from "platforms over which we have no control," says Dutch minister:

Governments in France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium have started rolling out in-house messaging services for officials to exchange sensitive information, in an effort to stop staff from using popular encrypted apps and switch to local alternatives they can control. Defense alliance NATO also has its own messenger, and the European Commission plans to make the switch by the end of the year.

The move toward government-controlled messaging apps is part of Europe's search for alternatives to American technology, sparked by fears of being strategically dependent on Washington. WhatsApp is owned by U.S. tech giant Meta, while Signal is run by a U.S.-based non-profit and managed by a large community of open-source software enthusiasts.

The effort to unplug from American companies also reflects growing recognition among governments of the vulnerabilities of mainstream messaging apps for sharing sensitive information between politicians.

"Our communication currently often takes place via platforms over which we have no control," Willemijn Aerdts, the Netherlands' digital minister, told POLITICO in a statement. "In a world where technology is increasingly being used as a tool of power, that poses a risk."

Brandon De Waele, the director of Belgian Secure Communications, the Belgian federal government agency in charge of its new secure app, said: "Everyone in Europe is getting more and more awake on sovereignty ... For us it's data sovereignty."

WhatsApp and Signal have faced cybersecurity challenges in recent weeks. Last month, dozens of cybersecurity agencies warned that Russian hacking groups were targeting political and government officials on the messengers with high-level phishing attacks.

"Fnord666" writes:

The Dumbest Hack of the Year Exposed a Very Real Problem:

In the wee hours of the night last April, someone stopped at roughly 20 street intersections across Silicon Valley and launched an unprecedented cyberattack that would eventually spread to multiple states, embarrassing local officials and prompting them to question their security practices. Authorities suspect the unknown culprit took advantage of weak and publicly available default passwords to wirelessly upload custom recordings that played whenever a pedestrian pressed a crosswalk button.

Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from "forcefully" being inserted "into every facet of your conscious experience." At another, he celebrated "undermining democracy." At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as "actually really sweet and tender and loving," while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being "so alone."

Government emails and text messages obtained by WIRED through public records requests show how the cities of Menlo Park, Redwood City, Palo Alto, and later Seattle and Denver scrambled to respond to the crosswalk button tampering. The communications, along with interviews with security experts and former employees of the button manufacturer, highlight how governments and the company had overlooked vulnerabilities in a widespread technology.

In Redwood City, then-city manager Melissa Diaz quizzed staff about who should be blamed for the incident. "We need to understand who should be accountable for the security of these systems and what we can do to hold either staff or the external responsible party accountable," she wrote in an email to colleagues in the days after the hack.

Nick Mathiowdis, Redwood City's current communications manager, tells WIRED that staff have been addressing the issue based on "lessons learned and evolving best practices," but declines to share details to avoid encouraging further hacks.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Smash program focuses on processing, not mining:

The United States has spent years trying to rebuild its rare earth supply chain, but mining alone hasn’t fixed the core problem. Processing remains the sticking point, and as Data Centre Dynamics reports, that’s where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is placing a high-risk bet.

“So the challenge is processing, not mining,” said Julian McMorrow, Smash lead and program manager at DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. “We want to develop technologies to take the industry from wasting over 99 percent of its feedstock to making use of the entire feedstock.”

Traditional mining wastes enormous amounts of material during refinement. More than two tons of ore and 13 tons of water can produce just one kilogram of copper, leaving most of the original material discarded.

Smash explores a parallel processing model that attempts to extract nearly everything from a shovel of dirt at once. That concept borrows ideas from industries such as petroleum refining, where multiple outputs are separated efficiently from a single input.

The program also reflects concerns about relying on a single major site such as the Mountain Pass mine which once dominated global rare earth output but struggled when refining costs became uncompetitive.

DARPA notes that concentrating production in one location creates vulnerability if disruptions occur. A distributed model using varied feedstocks, including mining waste and recycled materials, could cut that exposure.

Smash will run as a 48-month effort split into two phases. The first will focus on proof-of-concept experiments, while the second will move toward working prototypes suitable for industrial mining environments.

Even if the technology succeeds in laboratory settings, scaling it economically could be tricky. Achieving profitability while maintaining strict environmental and labor standards will be the real test.

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

A stubborn misconception is hampering the already hard work of quantum readiness:

With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world.

AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the Advanced Encryption Standard , a block cipher suite formally adopted by NIST in 2001. While the specification allows 192- and 256-bit key sizes, AES 128 was widely considered to be the preferred one because it meets the sweet spot between computational resources required to use it and the security it offers. With no known vulnerabilities in its 30-year history, a brute-force attack is the only known way to break it. With 2 128 or 3.4 x 10 38 possible key combinations, such an attack would take about 9 billion years using the entire Bitcoin mining resources as of 2026.

Over the past decade, something interesting happened to all that public confidence. Amateur cryptographers and mathematicians twisted a series of equations known as Grover's algorithm to declare the death of AES 128 once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) came into being. They said a CRQC would halve the effective strength to just 2 64 , a small enough supply that—if true—would allow the same Bitcoin mining resources to brute force it in less than a second (the comparison is purely for illustration purposes; a CRQC almost certainly couldn't run like clusters of Bitcoin ASICs and more importantly couldn't parallelize the workload as the amateurs assume).

On Monday Valsorda finally channelled years' worth of frustration fueled by the widely held misunderstanding into a blog post titled Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys .

"There's a common misconception that quantum computers will 'halve' the security of symmetric keys, requiring 256-bit keys for 128 bits of security," he wrote. "That is not an accurate interpretation of the speedup offered by quantum algorithms, it's not reflected in any compliance mandate, and risks diverting energy and attention from actually necessary post-quantum transition work."

That's the easy part of the argument. The much harder part is the math and physics that explains it. At its highest level it comes down to a fundamental difference in the way a brute-force search works on classical computers versus the way it works using Grover's algorithm. Classical computers can perform multiple searches simultaneously, a capability that allows large tasks to be broken into smaller pieces to complete the overall job faster. Grover's algorithm, by contrast, requires a long-running serial computation, where each search is done one at a time.