But don't you think "they" might have tech more advanced than what the public is let to know about?
Asking the Hard Questions: Email
Gabriel Diaz
Ryder Carter
While it's certainly possible, the leaders of the quantum computing are still publicly active and developing their fields. If the public leaders of quantum computing were working on top secret government projects, they would be completely forbidden to share any kind of new knowledge about what they're doing - their work would be secret knowledge. I am assuming that the public leaders of quantum computing are the only ones around and that there are aren't others at the same level (or beyond that level) who are working exclusively on secret government projects.
Jonathan Nguyen
Email works well because its addresses are tied to DNS. You send mail to omg@wtf and the MX record of wtf tells you what machine to connect to try and deliver the mail. So your business can manage its mail internally, and you can have big centralized webmail products like protonmail and hotmail, and you can pay a few dollars a month for shared hosting and get email delivered to your own domain.
Any email replacement will need to share this property.
All of the obvious "why don't people just use that" prospective replacements don't work for the same reason Slack and Google Chat don't come with ircd ports: because businesses want control and lock-in. Twitter wants to sell you ads as you follow your timeline that they manage. Youtube doesn't want insurance ads to show up next to a video of a furry fucking a dog to death.
Nathan Mitchell
That's not quite a quantum computer. You get a ton of error in the results. This means that you are limited to what things you can use it for and algorithms that rely on there being no error will be unusable on current """quantum computers."""
James Myers
The error is probabilistic, you can sample the results of the computation longer and get more accuracy. Including 99.9999% sure etc.
Parker Roberts
Some algorithms will have results which will converge to the correct answer faster than other by doing that. There are some which will take a very large number of samples as there is a small chance of the correct answer even making it to the end of the algorithm when you collapse the qbits and see the results.
Brandon Collins
OP here
Good stuff, and I agree. Centralization in general is a bad idea, and it is precisely the reason why repacing email is so hard. This is also why I agree with that the EFF was probably compromised or something like that. By not conforming to a standardized protocol, these 'services' can try to sell users on the latest hot 'feature', and increase their vendor lock-in. Centralized systems that feed into a single company's server are bad for privacy and security, because that business (theoretically at least) has access to everything. 'you are the product' in other words.
Noah Martinez
I would also like to provide some answers I have received elsewhere, roughly summarized:
1. Matrix could replace it. Although Matrix implementations right now seem mostly like texting, the protocol could be used for something like electronic mail, much like how delta.chat took email and made it look like an instant messenger. The French govt already apparently uses matrix in the place of email.
2. Lavabit is creating DIME, which looks to be a drop-in replacement protocol for email. It has DMTP (SMTP replacement) and DMAP (IMAP replacement). This system goes a step beyond end-to-end encryption, and adds onion routing to make it anonymous as well.
3. Autocrypt can ease the process of using GPG email. It does have the issue of going back to cleartext in some cases though, and whether it will work well with old-school GPG is an unknown. Maybe that will be resolved in future standard versions.
Jacob Mitchell
We should be looking into post-quantum cryptography before discussing what should the successor of email look like. I believe breaking current public key encryption algorithms with a quantum computer will become feasible in a couple decades, when most of us will still be alive.
Henry Nelson
Doesn't matter. Any protocol out there conforms to the newest encryption standards when the last encryption standard is rendered unsafe.