[bawolff]

> But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language (so it's not like reading William Gibson who clearly has no idea and knows it - he's going for the emotional feel not the technology) but they don't understand what's actually going on.

That feels a bit harsh when reading a book written in 1992. Shor's algorithm was only invented in 1994. There was no indication about our quantum future at the time that novel was written

A Fire upon the deep is set in the far future. Its easy to imagine all non information-theoretic secure cryptosystems failing thousands of years from now. I think that prediction is more reasonable than most far-future scifi predictions.

If i remember right, i think that is the novel that predicts we'd still be using usenet when talking between planets (i read a long time ago), so i think the crypto prediction aged a lot better than that.

[tialaramex]

The communication is clearly inflected by Usenet conventions, but I think that's as forgiveable as the choice to have Banks' Culture starships named using our cultural references like "Just read the Instructions" or "Don't Try This At Home". I don't think we're told it actually is Usenet -- it's just that necessarily light speed comms is very slow compared to the pace of life at this scale so it will feel much like Usenet. So I actually thought this made lots of sense.

It's true that we have no apriori justification for the existence of symmetric cryptography and so in principle somebody might have a constructive proof that you can't do this at all and we're boned. There was no evidence for this when the book was written and there's no evidence for it now, but it's nowhere close to as crazy as the Zones of Thought physics so, sure.

[e40]

The Usenet comms gave me a lot of laughs. It was so cleverly done. It’s been a very long time since I read it, but that is one of the memories I have.