This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN. Connect it with friends’ homes. Remember what is missing from your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it with joy. Remember how we got here. Rebuild a community space that doesn’t need to be mediated by faceless corporations and ad revenue. Build something sustainable that brings you joy. Rebuild something you use daily.
Bring back what we’re missing.
For the first step, Khurana and Tomer focused on a quantum version of a one-way function, called a one-way state generator.
Khurana and Tomer dubbed these perplexing new building blocks one-way puzzles. But as Khurana and Tomer grappled with that task, they decided to take a more direct approach: Forget about the one-way state generators, and instead anchor one-way puzzles directly to the mathematical bedrock.
This problem, known as the matrix permanent problem, is notoriously difficult to solve for large matrices, and there’s no simple way to check whether a calculation is correct. The matrix permanent problem also has other special mathematical properties that cryptographers find appealing. “This would be a beautiful problem to base cryptography on,” Khurana said.