The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.” No, it’s not true. This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which wasn’t bad but was taken wildly out of proportion. Cryptography is safe, and will be for a long time EDITED TO ADD (11/3): Really good explainer from Dan Goodin.
So far the biggest achievement in quantum computing seems to either be making a super random number reasonably quickly, or figuring out what quantum computers might be good for some day. So breaking encryption seems like a big leap.