With a new Star Trek film due out this Summer, get ready for the regular slew of tenuous associations, philosophical and technological. Given that, let’s say upfront that the likely arrival of this concept, as just floated by chipmaker AMD, is years away.

It is essential that cryptography remains well ahead of the hackers, and that's precisely the motivation for a project that uses the quantum mechanical properties of photons to create tamper-proof keys.

Why should governments wait to follow the European Commission's lead before legislating for cloud computing services within their national boundaries? And what binding rules apply anyway?