If suitably powerful quantum computers can one day be built, many cryptosystems in common use today could be vulnerable due to something called quantum factorisation. Dr Stephan Neuhaus, senior lecturer at InIT, and Dr Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland show in a new paper that all currently published records in quantum factorisation were only achieved through trickery. In order to demonstrate that these do not pose a threat to currently used cryptosystems, they replicate those records with an 8-bit home computer from 1981, an abacus, and a dog.