Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for July 26, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

College senior challenges quantum computing assumptions; Bitcoin SV block size increased to 2GB; Venezuelan taxes flowing into cryptocurrency to evade sanctions; William Barr changes US government stance on encryption back-doors; Yet another Google whistleblower

Straight from my RSS feed:
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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  1. The Algorithm That Changed Quantum Machine Learning - Under the guidance of Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin, 18 year old Ewin Tang (now a PhD student at the University of Washington) set out to demonstrate in her senior thesis that quantum algorithms are faster than classical algorithms for processing recommendations like we see on Netflix, Youtube, and other platforms. Instead, she discovered a classical computing algorithm that forced the experts to rethink basic assumptions about quantum computing, demonstrating that classical algorithms can take advantage of some of the same properties that quantum algorithms exploit. According to the article, "The belief that quantum computing produces exponential improvements over classical computing algorithms for recommendation systems had been shattered", and "Ewin's break-through rules out the hope of an exponential quantum speedup for certain types of machine learning problems. But there are many other applications of quantum computers that are not affected by it—including breaking cryptographic codes, getting modest speedups for optimization problems, and probably most important of all, simulating quantum physics and chemistry themselves."

  2. Bitcoin SV Successfully Performed a Hard Fork Amid Timing Confusion - The Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) chain forked at 1400 UTC on July 24 in order to increase its block size limit from 128M to 2G. After the time of the fork, a number of blocks have been created in excess of the previous 128M size limit.

  3. Venezuela Turned Airport Taxes Into Bitcoin to Avoid Sanctions: Report - An investigation by the Spanish newspaper, ABC, reports that Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro has been converting airport taxes into cryptocurrency in an apparent money laundering scheme, in order to bypass US economic sanctions. The report claims that tax revenues are being converted to cryptocurrencies, transferred to foreign exchanges, and then converted to national currencies and sent back to Venezuela. The scheme has apparently been operating since 2018, and Maduro may even be looking to expand it.

  4. Attorney General William Barr on Encryption Policy - Barr's position is that adding back doors to encryption products increases risk, but the risk is worth it. Author, Bruce Schneier, asserts that this is the first time that the US government has acknowledged that government back-doors add risk. Until now, he says, the government position was that we just needed better technology, a position that Schneier calls, nerd harder.

  5. STEEM ‘Algorithms don’t write themselves’: Google whistleblower on Big Tech merging with politics - Google's Greg Coppola joins a growing chorus of whistle-blowers who claim that big tech is not politically neutral, and further asserts that big-tech and big-media have merged with a particular political party, saying that Google began meddling in politics during 2016. As an example, he claims that "Google News" draws from just a handful of sites that all have similar biases. To emphasize his point, he says that, algorithms “don’t write themselves – we write them to do what we want them to do,” and that machine learning is “just a tool that we control.” (A beneficiary reward of 5% has been assigned to @rt-international)

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