Quantum internet used by government: A team of government scientists at Los Alamos National Labs has released information that it's been using quantum internet for the last two years. Oh, ya know, no big deal.

Quantum internet is a big deal, actually. It uses the laws of quantum mechanics to create online communication that is 100% secure, always. Which sounds almost too good to be true, which is why it's long been the dream of security analysts and government drones.

The idea behind quantum internet is that measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, invariably changes it-thus, messages can't be intercepted, becasuse they are rendered garbled by the very process of any attempt at intercepting or deciphering them.

The rub, though, is that most quantum internet prototypes only allow messages to be sent between two locations, not shared with a team or forwarded. This is, again, due to the nature of quantum mechanics: working out where else a message should be routed changes the state of the message and renders it indecipherable.

Now, however, a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico has revealed that it has a different kind of quantum internet, and it's been using it successfully for about two years. Technology Review described its workings, saying 

"Their approach is to create a quantum network based around a hub and spoke-type network. All messages get routed from any point in the network to another via this central hub... The idea is that messages to the hub rely on the usual level of quantum security. However, once at the hub, they are converted to conventional classical bits and then reconverted into quantum bits to be sent on the second leg of their journey. So as long as the hub is secure, then the network should also be secure.

While that technique could be hindered by scalability, the team claims to have overcome that problem by equipping each node in the network with quantum transmitters, but not detectors. With only the hub capable of receiving quantum messages, it gets one-time messages from nodes which it uses to set up secure data transfer via a normal internet protocol."

All of that is sort of a headache, and not 100% following the principles of quantum internet, but it's amazing that these government scientists have been able to develop and use a network utilizing these concepts for two years.  And thus far, they've been 100% secure. Time will tell if it can carry on to other companies and if it is completely impervious to hackers.