Northern Hive has enjoyed a flurry of client wins and re-appointments in recent weeks. The Manchester-based marketing and PR agency has added clients from around the UK and Canada.

Hartpury College and Hartpury University has also re-appointed Northern Hive to handle communications and manage online activity around its major international equestrian competitions and the FEI European Championships. Due to the cancellation of in-person events due to the coronavirus pandemic, the agency is briefed with creating a digital and online campaign that will maintain engagement levels over the summer and boost awareness of the 2021 events. The brief also includes stakeholder and sponsor engagement, a series of virtual events, and assisting with content creation for Hartpurys academic courses and undergraduate student recruitment.

Phillip Cheetham, Equine Director at Hartpury, said Were pleased to welcome back Northern Hive as our PR partner, particularly during these unprecedented times. The coronavirus pandemic forced us to cancel our summer events and European Championships, so we were keen to quickly adapt and boost our online activity. Our events usually provide opportunities for students to gain real-world experience and make valuable connections, so we are keen to have a remote digital strategy that meets our objectives as closely as possible, even in these non-contact times. Northern Hive will also assist with stakeholder relations incorporating academic staff and our much-valued sponsors.

Leicestershire-based same day delivery firm Speedel has re-appointed Northern Hive to manage a B2B communications and content campaign highlighting its expertise in the aerospace, healthcare, legal and manufacturing sectors. Speedel provides dedicated UK sameday courier services 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, specialising in urgent and business-critical deliveries.

Shiraz Sidat, Operations Manager at Speedel added We are glad to have re-partnered with Northern Hive to support our marketing strategy. The team at Northern Hive have got to know our business very well and have consistently delivered on our campaign goals. We look forward to working with them on a number of new and exciting projects moving forward says Shiraz Sidat, Operations Manager at Speedel.

Form, creators of the carbon-negative yoga mat, has chosen Northern Hive to handle its press office and communications campaigns, helping to promote the brands sustainability and wellness message. Northern Hive will also help with the launch of two new designs Slate and Sky, targeting the UK and North American markets.

Led by its co-founders Heidi Benham and Toby Marshman who founded the company in 2016, Form has now been officially certified a Carbon Neutral by the Climate Neutral Organisation. The products are in fact carbon-negative, due to offsetting above and beyond their emission levels, coupled with continued commitments to reductions in their footprint including cutting use of air freight. All products and packaging are also fully recyclable or biodegradable.

Co-founder Toby Marshman said Were excited to be working with Northern Hive, particularly following our official Carbon Neutral certification. We are keen to promote the message that we are in fact carbon-negative, due to offsetting above and beyond their emission levels, coupled with continued commitments to reductions in their footprint including cutting the use of air freight.

All products and packaging are also fully recyclable or biodegradable. Northern Hive will help us to communicate this carbon-negative status and the overall message of sustainable fitness he added.

These wins follow on from an announcement that Toronto-based Association Quantum has handed Northern Hive a brief to drive awareness in the UK and North America. The agency already enjoys strong links with the technology sector, and has doubled down on creating partnerships with cutting edge companies including in the cybersecurity and quantum computing space.

Mark Hayward, Northern Hives CEO said Were working hard to go the extra mile for existing and new clients alike through these unprecedented times, so were really excited to have added these recent wins to our agency portfolio. Being a smaller agency allows us to be flexible and offer extra services to clients to help them through these uncertain weeks and months. Working remotely has worked very well for us, although with almost half of our clients based in North America, this was something we had already embraced.

Northern Hive was set up in 2019, and is a CIPR Member and Hubspot Partner Agency. The full service communications, PR and marketing agency remains set to open a Canadian office later in the year to better cater to its growing North American client base.

More here:
Northern Hive PR rides a wave of new client wins - Business Up North

Assessment of the Quantum Computing Market

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See original here:
Quantum Computing Market: Segmentation, Industry trends and Development to 2019-2029 - The Canton Independent Sentinel

Traditional network infrastructures and cybersecurity standards will be compromised if quantum computing becomes viable, the reason why quantum R&D is a key factor of EUs digital strategy

Our most sensitive information, say banking or browsing data, is kept secure by rather resilient encryption methods. With current computing capabilities, it is a very difficult task for a computer to run the necessary math in order to extract information from encrypted data. That is not the case, however, with quantum computing.

At their smallest, computers are made up of transistors, which process the smallest form of data: bits or 0s and 1s. Contrary to regular machines, which operate in bits, quantum computers process qubits, which carry not one of those two values, but any of those two. Because they operate in qubits, they are able to process data unseemingly faster.

If a regular computer were to guess the combination of two bits, it would take, at worst, four different tries (22 00, 01, 10, 11) before guessing it. A quantum computer would only require the square root of that, because each qubit carries any of the two values. When processing large numbers this makes a huge difference.

While it is not expected that quantum computers will be commercially viable or even sufficiently developed anytime soon to squander computing as it is today, a number of the encryption algorithms used today are not quantum-resistant.

Having considered the above, it is not uncalled for that organizations are rethinking their cybersecurity standards in order to protect their data in view of new developing technologies, namely quantum computing.

Portugal signed up for EU's Quantum Communication Infrastructure initiative ("EuroQCI"). The initiative trusts on developing a network over the next ten years for sensitive information to be shared. As with anything that may be ill-used, quantum computing poses a serious cyberthreat. EuroQCI will use quantum technologies to ensure the secure transfer and storage of sensitive information. As computer parts are now as small as the size of an atom and current computing is reaching its physical limits, the EuroQCI aims at making quantum computing and cryptography a part of conventional communication networks, which is in line with Portugal's strategy to strengthen the country's digital ecosystem.

Objective number one of Portugal's National Cybersecurity Strategy is to ensure national digital resilience by leveraging inclusion and cooperation in order to bolster the security of cyberspace in view of threats which may jeopardize or cause disruption of networks and information systems essential to society. Currently, the EU's Study on the System Architecture of a Quantum Communication Infrastructure (within the EuroQCI initiative) is open for contributions on the future of quantum network infrastructures. The consultation is open until 10 June 2020.

Read more from the original source:
Quantum computing is the next big leap - Lexology

In March, I explored the enterprise readiness of quantum computing in Quantum computing is right around the corner, but cooling is a problem. What are the options? I also detailed potential industry use cases, from supply chain to banking and finance. But what are the industry giants pursuing?

Recently, I listened to two somewhat different perspectives on quantum computing. One is Googles (public) ten-year plan.

Google plans to search for commercially viable applications in the short term, but they dont think there will be many for another ten years - a time frame I've heard one referred to as bound but loose. What that meant was, no more than ten, maybe sooner. In the industry, the term for the current state of the art is NISQ Noisy, Interim Scale Quantum Computing.

The largest quantum computers are in the 50-70 qubit range, and Google feels NISQ has a ceiling of maybe two hundred. The "noisy" part of NISQ is because the qubits need to interact and be nearby. That generates noise. The more qubits, the more noise, and the more challenging it is to control the noise.

But Google suggests the real unsolved problems in fields like optimization, materials science, chemistry, drug discovery, finance, and electronics will take machines with thousands of qubits and even envision one million on a planar array etched in aluminum. Major problems need solving such noise elimination, coherence, and lifetime (a qubit holds its position in a tiny time slice).

In the meantime, Google is seeking customers to work with them to find applications working with Google researchers. Quantum computing needs algorithms as much as it needs qubits. It requires customers with a strong in-house science team and a commitment of three years. Whatever is discovered will be published as open source.

In summary, Google does not see commercial value in NISQ. They are using NISQ to discover what quantum computing can do that has any commercial capability.

First of all, if you have a picture in your mind of a quantum computer, chances are you are not including an essential element a conventional computer. According toQuantum Computing, Progress, and Prospects:

Although reports in the popular press tend to focus on the development of qubits and the number of qubits in the current prototypical quantum computing chip, any quantum computer requires an integrated hardware approach using significant conventional hardware to enable qubits to be controlled, programmed, and read out.

The author is undoubtedly correct. Most material about quantum computers never mentions this, and it raises quite a few issues that can potentially dilute the gee-whiz aspect. I'd heard this first from Itamar Sivan, Ph.D., CEO, Quantum Machines. He followed with the quip that technically, quantum computers aren't computers. Its that simple. They are not Turing Machines. File this under the category of "You're Not Too Old to Learn Something New.

From (Hindi) Theory of Computation - Turing Machine:

A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine, which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine capable of simulating that algorithm's logic can be constructed.

Dr. Sivan clarified this as follows:

Any computer to ever be used, from the early-days computers, to massive HPCs, are all Turing-machines, and are thereforeequivalent to one another. All computers developedand manufactured in the last decades, are all merelybigger and more compact variations of one another. A quantum computer however is not MERELY a more advanced Turing machine, it is a different type of machine, and classical Turing machines are not equivalent to quantum computers as they are equivalent to one another.

Therefore, the complexity of running particular algorithms on quantum computers is different from the complexity of running them on classical machines. Just to make it clear, a quantum computer can be degenerated to behave like a classical computer, but NOT vice-versa.

There is a lot more to this concept, but most computers you've ever seen or heard of are Turing Machines, except Quantum computers. This should come as no surprise because anything about quantum mechanics is weird and counter-intuitive, so why would a quantum computer be any different?

According to Sivan, a quantum computer needs three elements to perform: a quantum computer and an orchestration platform of (conventional) hardware and software. There is no software in a quantum computer. The platform manages the progress of their algorithm through, mostly laser beams pulses. The logic needed to operate the quantum computer resides with and is controlled by the orchestration platform.

The crucial difference in Google's and Quantum Machines' strategy is that Google views the current NISQ state of affairs as a testbed for finding algorithms and applications for future development. At the same time, Sivan and his company produced an orchestration platform to put the current technology in play. Their platform is quantum computer agnostic it can operate with any of them. Sivan feels that focusing solely on the number of qubits is just part of the equation. According to Dr. Sivan:

While today's most advanced quantum computers only have a relatively small number of available qubits (53 for IBM's latest generation and 54 for Google's Sycamore processor), we cannot maximize the potential of even this relatively small count. We are leaving a lot on the table with regards to what we can already accomplish with the computing power we already have. While we should continue to scale up the number of qubits, we also need to focus on maximizing what we already have.

Ive asked a few quantum computer scientists if quantum computers can solve the Halting Problem.In Wikipedia:

The halting problem is determining, from a description of an arbitrarycomputer programand an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever.Alan Turingproved in 1936 that a generalalgorithmto solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs could not exist.

That puts it in a class of problems that are undecidable. Oddly, opinion was split onthequestion, despite Turings Proof. Like Simplico said to Galileo inDialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, If Aristotle had not said otherwise I would have believed it.

There are so many undecidable problems in math that I wondered if some of these might fall out.For example, straight from current AI problems, Planning in aPartially observable Markov decision process is considered undecidable. A million qubits? Maybe not. After all, Dr. Sivan pointed out that toreplicate in a classical processor, the information in just a 300 qubit quantum processor would require more transistors than all of the atoms inthe universe.

I've always believed that action speaks louder than words. While Google is taking the long view, Quantum Machines provides the platform to see how far we can go with current technology. Googles tactics are familiar. Every time you use TensorFlow, it gets better. Every time play with their autonomous car, it gets better. Their collaboration with a dozen or so technically advanced companies makes their quantum technology better.

The rest is here:
The technical realities of functional quantum computers - is Googles ten-year plan for Quantum Computing viable? - Diginomica

Quantum computers stand a good chance of changing the face computing, and that goes double for encryption. For encryption methods that rely on the fact that brute-forcing the key takes too long with classical computers, quantum computing seems like its logical nemesis.

For instance, the mathematical problem that lies at the heart of RSA and other public-key encryption schemes is factoring a product of two prime numbers. Searching for the right pair using classical methods takes approximately forever, but Shors algorithm can be used on a suitable quantum computer to do the required factorization of integers in almost no time.

When quantum computers become capable enough, the threat to a lot of our encrypted communication is a real one. If one can no longer rely on simply making the brute-forcing of a decryption computationally heavy, all of todays public-key encryption algorithms are essentially useless. This is the doomsday scenario, but how close are we to this actually happening, and what can be done?

To ascertain the real threat, one has to look at the classical encryption algorithms in use today to see which parts of them would be susceptible to being solved by a quantum algorithm in significantly less time than it would take for a classical computer. In particular, we should make the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric encryption.

Symmetric algorithms can be encoded and decoded with the same secret key, and that has to be shared between communication partners through a secure channel. Asymmetric encryption uses a private key for decryption and a public key for encryption onlytwo keys: a private key and a public key. A message encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the private key. This enables public-key cryptography: the public key can be shared freely without fear of impersonation because it can only be used to encrypt and not decrypt.

As mentioned earlier, RSA is one cryptosystem which is vulnerable to quantum algorithms, on account of its reliance on integer factorization. RSA is an asymmetric encryption algorithm, involving a public and private key, which creates the so-called RSA problem. This occurs when one tries to perform a private-key operation when only the public key is known, requiring finding the eth roots of an arbitrary number, modulo N. Currently this is unrealistic to classically solve for >1024 bit RSA key sizes.

Here we see again the thing that makes quantum computing so fascinating: the ability to quickly solve non-deterministic polynomial (NP) problems. Whereas some NP problems can be solved quickly by classical computers, they do this by approximating a solution. NP-complete problems are those for which no classical approximation algorithm can be devised. An example of this is the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), which asks to determine the shortest possible route between a list of cities, while visiting each city once and returning to the origin city.

Even though TSP can be solved with classical computing for smaller number of cities (tens of thousands), larger numbers require approximation to get within 1%, as solving them would require excessively long running times.

Symmetric encryption algorithms are commonly used for live traffic, with only handshake and the initial establishing of a connection done using (slower) asymmetric encryption as a secure channel for exchanging of the symmetric keys. Although symmetric encryption tends to be faster than asymmetric encryption, it relies on both parties having access to the shared secret, instead of being able to use a public key.

Symmetric encryption is used with forward secrecy (also known as perfect forward secrecy). The idea behind FS being that instead of only relying on the security provided by the initial encrypted channel, one also encrypts the messages before they are being sent. This way even if the keys for the encryption channel got compromised, all an attacker would end up with are more encrypted messages, each encrypted using a different ephemeral key.

FS tends to use Diffie-Hellman key exchange or similar, resulting in a system that is comparable to a One-Time Pad (OTP) type of encryption, that only uses the encryption key once. Using traditional methods, this means that even after obtaining the private key and cracking a single message, one has to spend the same effort on every other message as on that first one in order to read the entire conversation. This is the reason why many secure chat programs like Signal as well as increasingly more HTTPS-enabled servers use FS.

It was already back in 1996 that Lov Grover came up with Grovers algorithm, which allows for a roughly quadratic speed-up as a black box search algorithm. Specifically it finds with high probability the likely input to a black box (like an encryption algorithm) which produced the known output (the encrypted message).

As noted by Daniel J. Bernstein, the creation of quantum computers that can effectively execute Grovers algorithm would necessitate at least the doubling of todays symmetric key lengths. This in addition to breaking RSA, DSA, ECDSA and many other cryptographic systems.

The observant among us may have noticed that despite some spurious marketing claims over the past years, we are rather short on actual quantum computers today. When it comes to quantum computers that have actually made it out of the laboratory and into a commercial setting, we have quantum annealing systems, with D-Wave being a well-known manufacturer of such systems.

Quantum annealing systems can only solve a subset of NP-complete problems, of which the travelling salesman problem, with a discrete search space. It would for example not be possible to run Shors algorithm on a quantum annealing system. Adiabatic quantum computation is closely related to quantum annealing and therefore equally unsuitable for a general-purpose quantum computing system.

This leaves todays quantum computing research thus mostly in the realm of simulations, and classical encryption mostly secure (for now).

When can we expect to see quantum computers that can decrypt every single one of our communications with nary any effort? This is a tricky question. Much of it relies on when we can get a significant number of quantum bits, or qubits, together into something like a quantum circuit model with sufficient error correction to make the results anywhere as reliable as those of classical computers.

At this point in time one could say that we are still trying to figure out what the basic elements of a quantum computer will look like. This has led to the following quantum computing models:

Of these four models, quantum annealing has been implemented and commercialized. The others have seen many physical realizations in laboratory settings, but arent up to scale yet. In many ways it isnt dissimilar to the situation that classical computers found themselves in throughout the 19th and early 20th century when successive computers found themselves moving from mechanical systems to relays and valves, followed by discrete transistors and ultimately (for now) countless transistors integrated into singular chips.

It was the discovery of semiconducting materials and new production processes that allowed classical computers to flourish. For quantum computing the question appears to be mostly a matter of when well manage to do the same there.

Even if in a decade or more from the quantum computing revolution will suddenly make our triple-strength, military-grade encryption look as robust as DES does today, we can always comfort ourselves with the knowledge that along with quantum computing we are also increasingly learning more about quantum cryptography.

In many ways quantum cryptography is even more exciting than classical cryptography, as it can exploit quantum mechanical properties. Best known is quantum key distribution (QKD), which uses the process of quantum communication to establish a shared key between two parties. The fascinating property of QKD is that the mere act of listening in on this communication will cause measurable changes. Essentially this provides unconditional security in distributing symmetric key material, and symmetric encryption is significantly more quantum-resistant.

All of this means that even if the coming decades are likely to bring some form of upheaval that may or may not mean the end of classical computing and cryptography with it, not all is lost. As usual, science and technology with it will progress, and future generations will look back on todays primitive technology with some level of puzzlement.

For now, using TLS 1.3 and any other protocols that support forward secrecy, and symmetric encryption in general, is your best bet.

Continued here:
Quantum Computing And The End Of Encryption - Hackaday