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This weekend, the Denier Roundup had a rare chance to observe a concentrated group of people steadfastly refusing to acknowledge reality in the real world, instead of online. We didnt go looking for the circus, but when some thousands of them decided to come to DC, during another surge of the pandemic many of them refuse to even really acknowledge, with the express purpose of claiming their candidate won an election he very much lost we couldnt resist the call of duty.

By Climate Denier Roundup

The impetus for this somewhat impromptu gathering were the celebrations around the world as people spontaneously hit the streets to revel in Trumps loss and President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harriss win. In response, a smattering of publicity-seekers glommed on to an existing event permit in DC. It brought in the likes of racist Trump-orbiting speakers like Sebastian I swore a lifelong oath to the Nazi-collaborating Hungarian nationalist group Vitzi Rend, as indicated by my taking of v. as a middle initialandwearing its medal to Trumps Inauguration L v. Gorka. There was also a speaker who led the crowd in a chant of a Q-Anon slogan, and presumably some very fine (mostly) white people and of course Trump flags.

And thats the problem with this loser festival. Theyre not just pathetically incapable of accepting that Trump lost the 2020 election by both the popular vote and the electoral college; theyre also actively trying to delegitimize President-elect Biden, force their way into a second Trump term, and dismantle the entire notion of democracy.

Gorka, for example, was actively encouraging the assembled crowd of a few thousand maskless faces in front of the Supreme Court to lobby their local electoral college electors to disregard the legitimate election results, which they are told was rigged and manipulated by Democrats (despite key portions of multiple swing states election infrastructure being controlled by Republicans) and instead cast electoral ballots for Trump so that he could remain in power.

This wasnt just one last hit of the ol Trump Rally high, it was an incitement to overthrow the election, to ignore its results, and keep fighting for Trump. And while that may mean, for many of the attendees, simply continuing to feed his email marketing machine their social security checks, for some it was a much more literal message, and the mixing of those groups is what mainstreams fascism.

Because, along with the families and the alt-right media personalities that consider Fox News part of the lamestream media (because even Fox wont have them on), were groups like the Proud Boys, for whom political violence is aprerequisite for advancementwithin their organization. And they werent there to be nice, and celebrate four great years of owning the libs, they were there to intimidate the predominantly Black residents of DC, and to then pick fights with their perceived enemies: people who oppose fascism. This is not exaggeration or hyperbole. One Proud Boy leader, Kyle Chapman,actually resigned last weekbecause he thought the group that embraces western chauvanism as a euphemism for its age-old bigotry wasnt sufficientlyhomophobic, racist, and anti-semitic. Chapman is known by followers asBased Stickmanbecause of a picture that went viral of him attacking a Trump protestor with a leaded stick in 2017.

So, this wasnt just a bunch of Fox-fried Boomers throwing a politically impotent meme-fest, (though it was also definitely that). It was an attempt to radicalize the audience to do anything they could to overthrow the election an audience that included people for whom political violence is a proud rite of passage.

This was plain from the very start. The rallys visitors to DC, a (farfromperfect) liberal, multicultural, multiracial city, made forBlack Lives Matter Plazaas soon as they arrived on

Friday night. Their first order of business? Ripping down the memorial posters for Breonna Taylor and other victims of racist policing that had been adorned to the fence Trump had erected around the White House.

Nevertheless, many called for the people of DC to stay home, ignore the influx of fascists into the streets of our nations capital, to humor their little show and let them rally in peace. We should cede the public square, they implicitly advised their millions of Twitter followers, to let these fascists lick their wounds in peace, in public, by dominating the streets of DC.

But on Saturday morning, local organizations put out the call for those who could to show up, so that the people who fought for Black lives to matter could at least hold on to that space. Otherwise it would be bastardized by the very politically-cultivated racism and hatred that required the words BLACK LIVES MATTER to be written in 35-foot letters down 16th Street, as a reminder to the man currentlyoccupying the Peoples House, in the first place.

Ceding public spaces to election-denying fascists would do nothing to dissuade them from coming back, and preemptive surrender would only embolden them further to believe their violence is condoned by those who dont actively oppose it.

This big, white, cis-straight, able-bodied, right-down-the-street, masculine-presenting, Denier Roundup writer, got that call for help protecting BLM Plaza, so he masked up, and headed out

Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

Link:
Deniers In The Wild: A roundup from Saturday's racist-right rally denying Trump's loss - Red, Green, and Blue

Out of the blue

Hungarys sponsorship of the Geneva declaration put the country at the helm of a motley coalition of pro-life hardliners that reject any international obligation on the part of states to finance or facilitate abortion, the document reads.

Most of its 30-odd signatories make up the 20 worst countries around the world for women to live in, according to the Women, Peace and Security Index compiled by Georgetown University. Hungary, ranked 49th, is the third worst among all EU countries and ranks even below the likes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

None of the people on the list could care less about women, Gillian Kane from Ipas, an international safe access to abortion advocacy group, summed up for The Guardian newspaper.

The declaration is legally void and does not change any laws already in place. But Hungarys stamp on the family-touting document was still a rude awakening to many, even in the face of the governments years-long pursuit of a policy to spur procreation within predominantly middle-class families with the motif of jumpstarting population growth, Reka Safrany, who chairs the Hungarians Womens Lobby, told BIRN.

Though the governments mounting hostility toward reproduction rights was palpable, we didnt see [the Geneva Consensus Declaration] coming, Safrany added.

Since its return to power in 2010, Orbans government has introduced several obstacles to obtaining an abortion. It wasted no time in slotting language about protecting the foetus since its conception in the constitution, a first for Europe at the time.

Though abortion has remained legal, women can only request the procedure within a narrow set of circumstances, as in the case of grave damage to the foetus, when the mothers health is at risk or when the pregnancy is the result of a crime. Pregnancies can also be mandated by the womans precarious socio-economic situation, which provides a walkable trail for abortions within the public health system in spite of the laws limiting scope, Safrany explained.

The message is clear: if you choose abortion, the state wants you to have it the hard way.

Noa Nogradi, womens rights expert and political philosopher

Women are also subject to mandatory waiting periods and two counselling sessions that are deliberately intended to change minds and dissuade them from going ahead with an abortion. Yet according to research by the PATENT association, a reproductive rights watchdog, these counselling sessions only seem to add to the womens mental strain. Of the more than a hundred women we asked, not a single one came away from it dissuaded. But they all felt humiliated, expert Nogradi, who took part in the study, said.

And its getting harder to book an appointment, even though abortions are extremely time sensitive and you simply cant have the procedure without it, Nogradi added.

Permits for medical abortions that rely on pills have been revoked, leaving many women with surgery as their only option other than going abroad. Nogradi thinks this policy is tinged with ideology. The message is clear: if you choose abortion, the state wants you to have it the hard way.

The past two decades has seen a steady decline in the number of abortions carried out in Hungary. Last year, close to 26,000 pregnancies were surgically terminated in the country, half the tally from 15 years ago, according to the Central Statistical Office. Yet the governments anti-abortion tirade continues.

Minister of Human Resources Miklos Kasler famously blamed abortion for Hungarys population decline, brushing off data that showed the countrys death rate twice outstrips the number of abortions.

And Family Minister Novak has spoken out against abortion in an oft-cited interview with the alt-right website Breitbart. She branded the pro-choice movement as pro-killing and applauded Hungarys family-oriented mentality.

A state-sponsored schoolbook published at the outset of the past academic year reportedly contained several anti-abortion references.

This worldview is reflected in the governments family planning program that offers free in vitro fertilisation to couples in a bid to boost fertility rates. But the policy leaves many people behind, activist Safrany suggests, as its focused on middle-class families. Family planning is also about affordable contraception and adequate education. Why dont these programs have the same backing when many women lack the means to afford them?

The governments family-centric orientation is extreme, Judit Zeller from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union told BIRN, and could lead to completely shutting out non-married couples or singles from fertilisation treatments.

Conscientious objections to abortions from doctors, often incentivised by government funding, are also on the rise. Yet even in the current legal framework, abortion is a right that should be upheld. After all, abortions are part of the specialists job, thats what they learn at university, Safrany said.

More:
Activists Fear Abortion at Risk in Hungary from Orban's Family-First Crusade - Balkan Insight

The 2020 U.S. presidential election brought into sharp relief the contrast between the American and Israeli Jewish communities, the two main centers of the Jewish world. According to post-election surveys, American Jewish support for the Democrats remains extremely high, at 77 percent (up from 70 percent in 2016). President Donald Trump was estimated to have received a mere 21 percent of the Jewish vote. In Israel, however, surveys have shown that Israeli Jews prefer Trump to Biden by 70 percent to 13 percent.

Much has been written on the growing gap between American Jews and Israel in terms of values and Jewish identity. In particular, the entrenchment of the occupation and the growing authoritarianism of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime has provoked growing disillusionment with Israel, especially among young Jewish progressives in North America. On the one hand is Israels unmistakable shift to the nationalist right; on the other, American Jews commitment to liberal, pluralistic, and progressive ideals, exemplified by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The liberal icon symbolized for many the role that Jewish Tikkun Olam can play in the struggle for universal social justice.

Now, the two communities find themselves not only drifting apart, but also increasingly at loggerheads. Most American Jews see Trump as a clear threat, while most Israeli Jews view him as an ally who offers security and hope. This divergence has to do not only with the two communities different values, but also their structural positions.

For a relatively prosperous and largely white minority, the extent of American Jewish backing for the Democrats is striking. A 2015 study found that Jewish support for Democrats was 40 percent higher than that of non-Jews in similar socio-economic positions. And while some of it can be explained in Jewish levels of education and concentration in metropolitan areas, this is clearly far from the whole story.

The Democratic Partys model of inclusive citizenship fits American Jewish aspirations to cultivate a cultural and religious minority identity alongside civic participation. In such a model, Jewish particularism and universal American citizenship reinforce each other as two sides of the same coin. The Republican Partys overwhelmingly white Christian character, on the other hand, is far less accommodating in this regard. The GOPs strong Evangelical base, and its Christian-infused social conservatism, have dissuaded most Jews from considering it a political home.

In the last four years, Trumps connections with the extreme right have added an explicit antisemitic dimension to this equation. Trump has repeatedly refused to denounce white supremacist groups and the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy. GOP politicians routinely invoke conspiracies regarding the Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros, while using their support for Israel to deflect charges of antisemitism.

The Womens March on New York, January 21, 2017. (Gili Getz)

The shift in the GOPs rhetoric under Trump has revealed that the general assimilation of white Jews into whiteness has clear limits. Trumps comments to American Jews, in which he referred to Israel as your country and Benjamin Netanyahu as your prime minister, betrayed his understanding of U.S. Jews as not fully American, in keeping with his overall exclusivist notion of citizenship.

The 2018 deadly attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue by a white nationalist who subscribed to GOP-amplified conspiracy theories involving Soros and immigration, meanwhile, showed in the starkest terms the dangers of Trumps normalization of white supremacy. The place of Jews in a nativist America is far from secure, and it is clear why they reject overwhelmingly this political vision.

Israeli support for Trump is similarly rooted in structural realities, and is tied to the transformation of Israels political system in the last 20 years. The slow but sure demise of the two-state solution, and the effective incorporation of the occupied West Bank into Israel, mark the emergence of a one-state political system in which Jewish dominance is secured through the erosion of Israels democratic features. If American Jews are a minority, Israeli Jews are in the opposite position. They constitute a hegemonic group of about 50 percent of the population in Israel-Palestine.

As Raef Zreik recently wrote on +972 Magazine, the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law spells out the new model of Jewish political dominance, with the downgrading of citizenship for Palestinians in Israel and commitment to Jewish settlement as a national value. As the permanence of the occupation becomes increasingly obvious, Israel can no longer maintain its democratic credentials and present itself as an island of liberalism in the Middle East.

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This explains why Israel has sought in the last decade to position itself as a strategic ally of the rising global authoritarian, revanchist, and Islamophobic right, headed by Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbn and, of course, Trump. For now, this alliance appears to be working in Israels interests, in an increasingly illiberal world. Israeli right-wing commentators supportive of Trump have adopted alt-right rhetoric, and have spoken in disparaging and even antisemitic terms about U.S. Jews support for liberal values. Key Netanyahu surrogates have described J Street as Jew boys, referred to American Jews as suburban rich people with private police, and routinely circulated Soros conspiracies.

Could this change under a Joe Biden presidency? It is almost certain that Bidens White House will try to revert, at least rhetorically, to previous patterns. No doubt the administration, very much like the EU, will try to revive the charade of the peace process and two-state solution. This will not change any of the existing dynamics, but it would enable international actors to continue ignoring the reality of effective Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Yet it is doubtful that this could work for much longer.

For Israel, the global hard right is now a natural and perhaps inevitable choice. Israels preference for a Trumpist GOP is therefore a logical conclusion, while for most American Jews, Trumpism is an anathema and a threat. Under these conditions, the rift between the communities could deepen and become about much more than values or disillusionment. It represents the clash of radically different alignments, rooted in the political trajectories and positions of both communities. This is no longer only about the future of Israel, but also about the future of Jews in the United States.

Read the rest here:
The global right is threat to US Jews but a natural home for Israelis - +972 Magazine

Quantum computing is bright and shiny, with demonstrations by Google suggesting a kind of transcendent ability to scale beyond the heights of known problems.

But there's a real bummer in store for anyone with their head in the clouds: All that glitters is not gold, and there's a lot of hard work to be done on the way to someday computing NP-hard problems.

"ETL, if you get that wrong in this flow-based programming, if you get the data frame wrong, it's garbage in, garbage out," according to Christopher Savoie, who is the CEO and a co-founder of a three-year-old startup, Zapata Computing of Boston, Mass.

"There's this naive idea you're going to show up with this beautiful quantum computer, and just drop it in your data center, and everything is going to be solved it's not going to work that way," said Savoie, in a video interview with ZDNet. "You really have to solve these basic problems."

"There's this naive idea you're going to show up with this beautiful quantum computer, and just drop it in your data center, and everything is going to be solved it's not going to work that way," said Savoie, in a video interview with ZDNet. "You really have to solve these basic problems."

Zapata sells a programming tool for quantum computing, called Orquestra. It can let developers invent algorithms to be run on real quantum hardware, such as Honeywell's trapped-ion computer.

But most of the work of quantum today is not writing pretty algorithms, it's just making sure data is not junk.

"Ninety-five percent of the problem is data cleaning," Savoie told ZDNet. "There wasn't any great toolset out there, so that's why we created Orquestra to do this."

The company on Thursday announced it has received a Series B round of investment totaling $38 million from large investors that include Honeywell's venture capital outfit and returning Series A investors Comcast Ventures, Pitango, and Prelude Ventures, among others. The company has now raised $64.4 million.

Also:Honeywell introduces quantum computing as a service with subscription offering

Zapata was spun out of Harvard University in 2017 by scholars including Aln Aspuru-Guzik, who has done fundamental work on quantum. But a lot of what is coming up are the mundane matters of data prep and other gotchas that can be a nightmare in a bold new world of only partially-understood hardware.

Things such as extract, transform, load, or ETL, which become maddening when prepping a quantum workload.

"We had a customer who thought they had a compute problem because they had a job that was taking a long time; it turned out, when we dug in, just parallelizing the workflow, the ETL, gave them a compute advantage," recalled Savoie.

Such pitfalls, said Savoie, are thingsthat companies don't know are an issue until they get ready to spend valuable time on a quantum computer and code doesn't run as expected.

"That's why we think it's critical for companies to start now," he said, even though today's noisy intermediate-scale quantum, or NISQ, machines have only a handful of qubits.

"You have to solve all these basic problems we really haven't even solved yet in classical computing," said Savoie.

The present moment in time in the young field of quantum sounds a bit like the early days of microcomputer-based relational databases. And, in fact, Savoie likes to make an analogy to the era of the 1980s and 1990s, when Oracle database was taking over workloads from IBM's DB/2.

Also:What the Google vs. IBM debate over quantum supremacy means

"Oracle is a really good analogy, he said. "Recall when SQL wasn't even a thing, and databases had to be turned on a per-on-premises, as-a-solution basis; how do I use a database versus storage, and there weren't a lot of tools for those things, and every installment was an engagement, really," recalled Savoie.

"There are a lot of close analogies to that" with today's quantum, said Savoie. "It's enterprise, it's tough problems, it's a lot of big data, it's a lot of big compute problems, and we are the software company sitting in the middle of all that with a lot of tools that aren't there yet."

Mind you, Savoie is a big believer in quantum's potential, despite pointing out all the challenges. He has seen how technologies can get stymied, but also how they ultimately triumph. He helped found startup Dejima, one of the companies that became a component of Apple's Siri voice assistant, in 1998. Dejima didn't produce an AI wave, it sold out to database giant Sybase.

"We invented this natural language understanding engine, but we didn't have the great SpeechWorks engine, we didn't have 3G, never mind 4G cell phones or OLED displays," he recalled. "It took ten years from 1998 till it was a product, till it was Siri, so I've seen this movie before I've been in that movie."

But the technology of NLP did survive and is now thriving. Similarly, the basic science of quantum, as with the basic science of NLP, is real, is validated. "Somebody is going to be the iPhone" of quantum, he said, although along the way there may be a couple Apple Newtons, too, he quipped.

Even an Apple Newton of quantum will be a breakthrough. "It will be solving real problems," he said.

Also: All that glitters is not quantum AI

In the meantime, handling the complexity that's cropping up now, with things like ETL, suggests there's a role for a young company that can be for quantum what Oracle was for structured query language.

"You build that out, and you have best practices, and you can become a great company, and that's what we aspire to," he said.

Zapata has fifty-eight employees and has had contract revenue since its first year of operations, and has doubled each year, said Savoie.

Read more:
Quantum computing now is a bit like SQL was in the late 80s: Wild and wooly and full of promise - ZDNet

My previous column about the possibility of pairing artificial intelligence with quantum computing to supercharge both technologies generated a storm of feedback via Twitter and email. Quantum computing is a science that is still somewhat misunderstood, even by scientists working on it, but might one day be extremely powerful. And artificial intelligence has some scary undertones with quite a few trust issues. So I understand the reluctance that people have when considering this marriage of technologies.

Unfortunately, we dont really get a say in this. The avalanche has already started, so its too late for all of us pebbles to vote against it. All we can do now is deal with the practical ramifications of these recent developments. The most critical right now is protecting government encryption from the possibility of quantum hacking.

Two years ago I warned that government data would soon be vulnerable to quantum hacking, whereby a quantum machine could easily shred the current AES encryption used to protect our most sensitive information. Government agencies like NIST have been working for years on developing quantum-resistant encryption schemes. But adding AI to a quantum computer might be the tipping point needed to give quantum the edge, while most of the quantum-resistant encryption protections are still being slowly developed. At least, that is what I thought.

One of the people who contacted me after my last article was Andrew Cheung, the CEO of 01 Communique Laboratory and IronCAP. They have a product available right now which can add quantum-resistant encryption to any email. Called IronCAP X, its available for free for individual users, so anyone can start protecting their email from the threat of quantum hacking right away. In addition to downloading the program to test, I spent about an hour interviewing Cheung about how quantum-resistant encryption works, and how agencies can keep their data protection one step ahead of some of the very same quantum computers they are helping to develop.

For Cheung, the road to quantum-resistant encryption began over 10 years ago, long before anyone was seriously engineering a quantum computer. It almost felt like we were developing a bulletproof vest before anyone had created a gun, Cheung said.

But the science of quantum-resistant encryption has actually been around for over 40 years, Cheung said. It was just never specifically called that. People would ask how we could develop encryption that would survive hacking by a really fast computer, he said. At first, nobody said the word quantum, but that is what we were ultimately working against.

According to Cheung, the key to creating quantum-resistant encryption is to get away from the core strength of computers in general, which is mathematics. He explained that RSA encryption used by the government today is fundamentally based on prime number factorization, where if you multiply two prime numbers together, the result is a number that can only be broken down into those primes. Breaking encryption involves trying to find those primes by trial and error.

So if you have a number like 21, then almost anyone can use factorization to quickly break it down and find its prime numbers, which are three and seven. If you have a number like 221, then it takes a little bit longer for a human to come up with 13 and 17 as its primes, though a computer can still do that almost instantaneously. But if you have something like a 500 digit number, then it would take a supercomputer more than a century to find its primes and break the related encryption. The fear is that quantum computers, because of the strange way they operate, could one day do that a lot more quickly.

To make it more difficult for quantum machines, or any other kind of fast computer, Cheung and his company developed an encryption method based on binary Goppa code. The code was named for the renowned Russian mathematician who invented it, Valerii Denisovich Goppa, and was originally intended to be used as an error-correcting code to improve the reliability of information being transmitted over noisy channels. The IronCAP program intentionally introduces errors into the information its protecting, and then authorized users can employ a special algorithm to decrypt it, but only if they have the private key so that the numerous errors can be removed and corrected.

What makes encryption based on binary Goppa code so powerful against quantum hacking is that you cant use math to guess at where or how the errors have been induced into the protected information. Unlike encryption based on prime number factorization, there isnt a discernible pattern, and theres no way to brute force guess at how to remove the errors. According to Cheung, a quantum machine, or any other fast system like a traditional supercomputer, cant be programmed to break the encryption because there is no system for it to use to begin its guesswork.

A negative aspect to binary Goppa code encryption, and also one of the reasons why Cheung says the protection method is not more popular today, is the size of the encryption key. Whether you are encrypting a single character or a terabyte of information, the key size is going to be about 250 kilobytes, which is huge compared with the typical 4 kilobyte key size for AES encryption. Even ten years ago, that might have posed a problem for many computers and communication methods, though it seems tiny compared with file sizes today. Still, its one of the main reasons why AES won out as the standard encryption format, Cheung says.

I downloaded the free IronCAP X application and easily integrated it into Microsoft Outlook. Using the application was extremely easy, and the encryption process itself when employing it to protect an email is almost instantaneous, even utilizing the limited power of an average desktop. And while I dont have access to a quantum computer to test its resilience against quantum hacking, I did try to extract the information using traditional methods. I can confirm that the data is just unreadable gibberish with no discernable pattern to unauthorized users.

Cheung says that binary Goppa code encryption that can resist quantum hacking can be deployed right now on the same servers and infrastructure that agencies are already using. It would just be a matter of switching things over to the new method. With quantum computers evolving and improving so rapidly these days, Cheung believes that there is little time to waste.

Yes, making the switch in encryption methods will be a little bit of a chore, he said. But with new developments in quantum computing coming every day, the question is whether you want to maybe deploy quantum-resistant encryption two years too early, or risk installing it two years too late.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

See the article here:
Is Now the Time to Start Protecting Government Data from Quantum Hacking? - Nextgov