Quantum Computing and Encryption Breaking

Posted by Earlz on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Earlz
Published on 2010-05-04T20:37:43Z Indexed on 2010/05/04 20:48 UTC
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quantum-computing

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encryption

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hashing

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cracking

Ok, I read a while back that Quantum Computers can break most types of hashing and encryption in use today in a very short amount of time(I believe it was mere minutes). How is it possible? I've tried reading articles about it but I get lost at the a quantum bit can be 1, 0, or something else. Can someone explain how this relates to cracking such algorithms in plain English without all the fancy maths?

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