Sometimes, when transcribing tenure case notes at Big Research Uni or some such thing, I run across tidbits that shall help me with my secret plans to take over the world.
(Why some evil genius or league of evil geniuses at BRU has not already done so, I don't know. It seems like they have the technology. Of course, as previously pointed out by my partner in crime... uh... college room mate, the most effective way to take over the world would be to do so without anyone noticing and be pulling the global strings from the shadows. Seeing as the best defense is to remove the need to defend. So maybe it's already happened.)
Today, the tidbit is quantum cryptography. The short explanation is that it uses quantum physics not only to encode communication, but to alert the users to the presence of a third party trying to listen in. Since it only is involved in the distribution of an encryption key, you can use any communication channel to transmit messages. Which is convenient.
I don't watch a million spy or superhero movies, so I may be wrong about this, but why the absence of quantum cryptography? At least the theory (if not the actual application) has been around since the 80s--so there's been plenty of time for it to make its way into writerly brains. And it sounds cool, which is the important thing for the technobabble. But then again, it would certainly make the bad guys harder to track, and thus foil--and the going cliche is that the good-guy techno-wizard can crack any code at any time from any computer (regardless of computing capability and type of encryption). Because good is so good that foiling evil couldn't possibly be that hard, right? So comforting.
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