[Cryptography] Some quantum computers might need more power than supercomputers

[Ron Garret]

> On Jan 10, 2026, at 1:34 PM, Nicko van Someren <nicko at nicko.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Jan 10, 2026, at 13:13, Jon Callas <jon at callas.org> wrote:
> ...
>> It's not even like that is a new thing. Back in the idealized era of Enigma/Lorentz decryptions, one of the major tasks was not decrypting messages so much as finding things worth decrypting. Decrypting the morning weather report isn't particularly useful. 
> 
> Well, actually specifically decrypting the morning weather report turned out to be very useful in the case of Enigma, because it was so predictable that it provided an excellent crib. As a result once you cracked the morning weather report you could get all the other traffic using that day's key. The rest of your argument all still holds though!


Enigma is not a good analogy here.  It's not that the weather reports were valuable targets but rather that they provided an opening for a (partial) known-plaintext attack.

rg