A Mighty Number Falls

space_in_your_face writes "An international team has broken a long-standing record in an impressive feat of calculation. On March 6, computer clusters from three institutions (the EPFL, the University of Bonn, and NTT in Japan) reached the end of eleven months of strenuous calculation, churning out the prime factors of a well-known, hard-to-factor number — 2^1039 - 1 — that is 307 digits long." The lead researcher believes "the writing is on the wall" for 1024-bit encryption. "Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a non-special hard-to factor number (155 digits). I won't make predictions, but let's just say it might be a good idea to stay tuned."

Comments

ummm....

[Ace905]

Ok, I know this is an overplayed argument - the 'humanity' card. Like when NASA announces they've found a way to get 3 men to the moon for just under 8 billion dollars - and people say, "Umm, couldn't we use 8 billion dollars in Florida for our worst-in-the-country school system?"

Obviously, that's a long and involved argument. But in this case - factoring a very large prime number - just by using methods we *knew* would work - but had never dedicated the resources to - what kind of real progress is that? We haven't really learned anything - have we?

Wouldn't that computing time have been way way more valuable to any of the 'potentially useful' distributed computing projects floating around out there? This sounds like a monumental waste of sciences new most-precious resource - CPU time.

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monumental waste!

Two ways to FUD

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

bool microsoft_fud_manager::HandleNews(){
      if( GetPlatform(clusters) == "Linux" ) then
              return IssuePressRelease("Linux is a hackers tool breaking encryption");
        }else if( GetPlatform(clusters) == "Windows"){
              return IssuePressRelease("Windows Rules! We solve big problems");
        } //throw "unexpected condition"; //throw disabled by bg.
        IssueGeneralFud();
}