Ric Richardson

Things are moving so fast in the quantum computer field that it's hard to gauge what is the current state of the art. The news that Microsoft has been making major advances in the field, for example, is more about the practicality of writing software for and providing production grade hardware components for what is at its core still very much an experimental technology. On the other hand, the recent news that Russian researchers have broken the 50 qubit threshold is of major significance to security professionals particularly. As a result, this article is an attempt to shed some light on the current state of the art in quantum computing and to give some background and context so that someone with limited technical knowledge can understand the main issues. Questions I’ll try and answer include: What is quantum computing in simple terms? Why can’t everybody build there own quantum computer? Why is it particularly powerful in breaking encryption? What is the sig...

I am writing this post in support of the talk I am scheduled to give tomorrow at the On Tribe Forum regarding “How to find your Free-Range-Chook”. Michelle Carter, who asked me to speak, has heard my bird analogy and thought it might be worth sharing, but it sure doesn't help explain what I'm talking about! I hope everyone is intrigued enough to stay and work out what it's about… in fact, it’s a principle which I have used for most of my mature business life so I hope it ends up being useful for everyone else. During the talk, I hope to get lots of feedback from the audience so I can zero in on what is most important to everyone, but I will be mentioning two books that I found very helpful and may be worth looking at in the context of our discussion. Now discover your strengths by Marcus Buckingham is really important for Aussies in particular as we often don’t realise how powerful our strengths are, but this also means that we may have weaknesses that preclude ...

Quite a bit of discussion came up after my article on Double Octopus and TokenOne who both rely on mobile authentication. For the uninitiated mobile authentication is the use of a mobile phone for primary or secondary authentication/ logon. So here are my top reasons that mobile authentication will not cut it: Reason 1: No one uses it today even though all the big companies have mobile authentication systems Google Authenticator is the most widely distributed and used mobile authentication app but…. look for it in the app stores top downloads list. It does not appear in the top 200 list for any market. And using the rule that there are 1,000 downloads for every comment then it’s a dead man walking. On top of that, I downloaded Google Authenticator so I am a downloaded but I only used it once. It feels like getting my keys out every time I want to go on a website. I wonder if any of the people touting mobile authentication have used it! Note: Google claims millions of downl...