Daily Archives: February 25, 2026

Loophole found that makes quantum cloning possible (kind of)

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In quantum mechanics, the idea that quantum information can’t be duplicated is ironclad – or at least, it was. A surprising approach to backing up qubits, the basic units of quantum computers, appears to allow a sidestepping of this fundamental law of physics.

The no-cloning theorem was first discovered by researchers in the 1980s. It says that quantum states that describe all the information about a system can’t be copied. Attempting to measure the information to copy it would simply destroy the delicate quantum properties that you want to measure. This fact has proved important for quantum technologies like encryption, leading to simple protocols that prevent information from being copied and hacked.

Achim Kempf at the University of Waterloo in Canada and his colleagues have now shown that a quantum system can, in fact, be cloned, as long as the information about it is encrypted and enclosed with a special, one-off decryption key.

“You can make a lot of copies and generate redundancy in this way, but you have to encrypt the copies, and the decryption key can only be used once,” says Kempf. “This makes it compatible with a no-cloning theorem, because it says there can only ever be at most one clear, obvious, readable, non-encrypted copy of a qubit.”

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Once they had proved this result theoretically, the team then showed that this protocol could work on a real IBM Heron 156-qubit quantum computing processor.

Because the technique is fairly resistant to noise and errors that are ubiquitous in today’s quantum computers, Kempf and his team found they could make hundreds of encrypted clones of single qubits, by repeating the process over and over again. “In fact, we ran out of real estate on the IBM processor. It holds only 156 qubits but we estimated that we can do more than 1000 encrypted clones before the [errors] make us stop.”

This modification to the no-cloning theorem could have uses for a quantum cloud storage or computing service, says Kempf. “If you send a file to Dropbox, it will save your data at least three times in three different computers that are geographically separated, so that if one is hit by fire, the other one by a flood, there’s a fair chance the third one survives,” says Kempf. “It used to be thought you can’t do that with quantum information, because you can’t clone it. But what we showed is that you can do it.”

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Kempf agrees. “It’s not cloning. It’s encrypted cloning,” he says. “That’s just a refinement of the no-cloning theorem.”

Journal reference

Physical Review Letters DOI: 10.1103/y4y1-1ll6

Journal reference

arXiv DOI: arXiv:2602.10695

Source: Loophole found that makes quantum cloning possible | New Scientist

‘Likely the Largest Breach in U.S. History’: What You Need to Know About the Conduent Fiasco

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At least 26 million people have had their personal data stolen from Conduent, a company that provides printing, payment, and document processing services for some of the largest health insurance providers in the country. Some are already calling it one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history, exposing addresses, social security numbers, and health information to ransomware hackers.

Conduent first discovered it was the victim of a “cyber incident” over a year ago on January 13, 2025, according to a notice posted online by the company. The breach itself happened from October 21, 2024, to January 13, 2025, and involved data held by Conduent because the company provides services to health plans.

The data included names, social security numbers, unspecified medical information, and health insurance information. The company emphasized in its notice that “not every data element was present for every individual,” meaning that some people may have just had their social security number stolen but not their health insurance info, or vice versa.

The full scale of the breach is still unclear. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote last week that over 4 million Texans had their data stolen, but Fox News reports that number has jumped to 15.4 million people. Texas has a total population of 31 million, meaning that roughly half the entire state was impacted.

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Oregon reported on its consumer protection website that 10.5 million were swept up in the breach, which already brings the running total to about 26 million. But residents of other states have also received notices, including people in California, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. Some of the states have relatively small numbers, like Maine, which has just 374 people whose data was exposed, according to the state’s Attorney General.

Conduent, which is based in New Jersey, didn’t respond to questions asking about the full scope of the hack and what victims can do about it via email on Tuesday.

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Source: ‘Likely the Largest Breach in U.S. History’: What You Need to Know About the Conduent Fiasco

Nearby Glasses Warns You When a Glasshole is Nearby

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The app, called Nearby Glasses, has one sole purpose: Look for smart glasses nearby and warn you.

Get It On Google Play

This app notifies you when smart glasses are nearby. It uses company identificators in the Bluetooth data sent out by these. Therefore, there likely are false positives (e.g. from VR headsets). Hence, please proceed with caution when approaching a person nearby wearing glasses. They might just be regular glasses, despite this app’s warning.

The app’s author Yves Jeanrenaud takes no liability whatsoever for this app nor it’s functionality. Use at your own risk. By technical design, detecting Bluetooth LE devices might sometimes just not work as expected. I am no graduated developer. This is all written in my free time and with knowledge I taught myself.
False positives are likely. This means, the app Nearby Glasses may notify you of smart glasses nearby when there might be in fact a VR headset of the same manufacturer or another product of that company’s breed. It may also miss smart glasses nearby. Again: I am no pro developer.
However, this app is free and it’s source is available (though it’s not considered foss due to the non-commercial restrition), you may review the code, change it and re-use it (under the license).
The app Nearby Glasses does not store any details about you or collects any information about you or your phone. There are no telemetry, no ads, and no other nuisance. If you install the app via Play Store, Google may know something about you and collect some stats. But the app itself does not.
If you choose to store (export) the logfile, that is completely up to you and your liability where this data go to. The logs are recorded only locally and not automatically shared with anyone. They do contain little sensitive data; in fact, only the manufacturer ID codes of BLE devices encountered.

Use with extreme caution! As stated before: There is no guarantee that detected smart glasses are really nearby. It might be another device looking technically (on the BLE adv level) similar to smart glasses.
Please do not act rashly. Think before you act upon any messages (not only from this app).

Why?

  • Because I consider smart glasses an intolerable intrusion, consent neglecting, horrible piece of tech that is already used for making various and tons of equally truely disgusting ‘content’. 1, 2
  • Some smart glasses feature small LED signifying a recording is going on. But this is easily disabled, whilst manufacturers claim to prevent that and take no responsibility at all (tech tends to do that for decades now). 3
  • Smart glasses have been used for instant facial recognition before 4 and reportedly will be out of the box 5. This puts a lot of people in danger.
  • I hope this is app is useful for someone.

How?

  • It’s a simple rather heuristic approach. Because BLE uses randomised MAC and the OSSID are not stable, nor the UUID of the service announcements, you can’t just scan for the bluetooth beacons. And, to make thinks even more dire, some like Meta, for instance, use proprietary Bluetooth services and UUIDs are not persistent, we can only rely on the communicated device names for now.
  • The currently most viable approach comes from the Bluetooth SIG assigned numbers repo. Following this, the manufacturer company’s name shows up as number codes in the packet advertising header (ADV) of BLE beacons.
  • this is what BLE advertising frames look like:
Frame 1: Advertising (ADV_IND)
Time:  0.591232 s
Address: C4:7C:8D:1E:2B:3F (Random Static)
RSSI: -58 dBm

Flags:
  02 01 06
    Flags: LE General Discoverable Mode, BR/EDR Not Supported

Manufacturer Specific Data:
  Length: 0x1A
  Type:   Manufacturer Specific Data (0xFF)
  Company ID: 0x058E (Meta Platforms Technologies, LLC)
  Data: 4D 45 54 41 5F 52 42 5F 47 4C 41 53 53

Service UUIDs:
  Complete List of 16-bit Service UUIDs
  0xFEAA
  • According to the Bluetooth SIG assigned numbers repo, we may use these company IDs:
    • 0x01AB for Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook)
    • 0x058E for Meta Platforms Technologies, LLC
    • 0x0D53 for Luxottica Group S.p.A (Who manufacturers the Meta Ray-Bans)
    • 0x03C2 for Snapchat, Inc., that makes SNAP Spectacles They are immutable and mandatory. Of course, Meta and other manufacturers also have other products that come with Bluetooth and therefore their ID, e.g. VR Headsets. Therefore, using these company ID codes for the app’s scanning process is prone to false positives. But if you can’t see someone wearing an Occulus Rift around you and there are no buildings where they could hide, chances are good that it’s smart glasses instead.
  • During pairing, the smart glasses usually emit their product name, so we can scan for that, too. But it’s rare we will see that in the field. People with the intention to use smart glasses in bars, pubs, on the street, and elsewhere usually prepare for that beforehand.
  • When the app recognised a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) device with a sufficient signal strength (see RSI below), it will push an alert message. This shall help you to act accordingly.

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Source: Github repo