Researchers are using machine learning algorithms to decrypt historical pencil-and-paper ciphers.

Sent by a Spanish diplomat. Apparently people have been working on it since it was rediscovered in 1860.

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography.

I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it’s largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008, in an essay titled “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless.”

Back then, I wrote:

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