I’ve not really bothered to follow the quantum computing hype until it was going to become any sort of reality in our future. The issue has been mostly around its instability and required error correction.
Some encryption has already been pronounced as quantum safe, e.g. Signal’s, but again we’d have to see that to believe it.
What has dramatically changed now, is that instead of the unstable physical quantum bits (qubits), a Harvard team has come up with a way to work with logical qubits s formed from bundles of redundant, error-corrected physical qubits. These can store information for use in a quantum algorithm. Creating logical qubits as controllable units — like classical bits — has been a fundamental obstacle for the field, and it’s generally accepted that until quantum computers can run reliably on logical qubits, the technology cannot really take off.
So, Steve does explain this in a way which is a bit easier to understand that it has taken things forward quite a bit. The link below is to the video of this episode of Security Now where he explains it. There is also a link on that page though to the PDF with the text notes from the show if you prefer to scan the text.
See https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/952?autostart=false