I agree that this system is *far* from stopping piracy of streaming media, however, this probably will *not* affect keyspace... IDEA is a pretty popular PK algo, right? A PGP attack FAQ   (I found trying to go to Fran Litterio's now-defunct PGP archive) which is fairly complete, albeit unconventional, has a statement that I would tend to agree with for just about any pk/hybrid cryptosystem based on large primes:
-- Brute Force of IDEA -- As we all know the keyspace of IDEA is 128-bits. In base 10 notation that is: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6. To recover a particular key, one must, on average, search half the keyspace. That is 127 bits: 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303715,884,105,728 . If you had 1,000,000,000 machines that could try 1,000,000,000 keys/sec, it would still take all these machines longer than the universe as we know it has existed and then some, to find the key. IDEA, as far as present technology is concerned, is not vulnerable to brute-force attack, pure and simple.
Of course, the claim of vulnerability to brute force attack has lost validity, at least to some extent, since it's 'publication' in '96... The point is, that's a lot of keys. If I'm not mistaken, *any* primes in that range are potential keys. (any crypto experts out there?)
Also working in a "Micro$oft-only shop," I believe that there are really only a few relatively basic reasons for their dominance. First and foremost always seems to be "support". Talk to any Micro$oft rep/team leader about linux, and the first question/bitch about it is "well, yeah, it may be cool, but who supports it?" As if it's not obvious that *several* vendors compete for the best "linux support"... Red Hat, Caldera, Corel, Mandrake, etc. (please, no 'Mandrake is just red hat!' or 'that's not a real distro!'... I don't know what a real distro is anymore, except debian and slakware...) The "support" issue comes up in other places too. For example, I write software (database frontends) mostly in Visual Basic and ASP. Why? Do I actually like them (and active-x for that matter) better than C++/Perl/PHP/Python? No, not really. It's because "Someone may have to support your code in the future!" Visual Basic really isn't all that more standard than C++, but I keep being told that "The next guy might not be as bright as you, and, well, the company would be in deep water if nobody is able to support the data warehouse!" I just learned VB three months ago... I doubt they would ever end up with a less experienced programmer than me... and if they *did*, 90% of all formal CS training in college is done in C++ anyway. Another very common reason here is interopterability. (sp? ehh?) Linux office apps are either "too immature" or "don't work together" or are "too hard to figure out". Please. ApplixWare and StarOffice both pretty damn intuitive, I think. Office components in both seem to play with each other. Sure there are some bugs, but there are also bugs in M$ products. Many exec/mgmt people are under the delusion that failings in compatibility between Office/Outlook/IE-based-DBMS's are due to "too much load", or "too many people on the localnet" etc., rather than inherent flaws. Just the same types of comments ISP tech support gets when IE or Dial-Up Networking doesn't bring their e-mail quickly enough. There is, of course, the issue of familiarity that Picass0 brought up in the previous post. Lastly, most M$ products we use are entrenched in the system because of some obscure feature that is "absolutely necessary" and "you can't do with linux/apache/mysql". Of course, mail service/external www/dns is all done on a couple of linux boxes... So the question is really, what the heck is "support"? The ability to rewrite my code, or fix desktops? Deploy new versions of shit on our customer service stations? Worse yet, how can it be provided satisfactorily for linux if it means something different every time it is used in conversation? Hell if I know...
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I agree that this system is *far* from stopping piracy of streaming media, however, this probably will *not* affect keyspace...
5 6.8 .
IDEA is a pretty popular PK algo, right? A PGP attack FAQ   (I found trying to go to Fran Litterio's now-defunct PGP archive) which is fairly complete, albeit unconventional, has a statement that I would tend to agree with for just about any pk/hybrid cryptosystem based on large primes:
-- Brute Force of IDEA --
As we all know the keyspace of IDEA is 128-bits. In base 10 notation that is:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
To recover a particular key, one must, on average, search half the keyspace. That is 127 bits:
170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303715,884,105,72
If you had 1,000,000,000 machines that could try 1,000,000,000 keys/sec, it would still take all these machines longer than the universe as we know it has existed and then some, to find the key.
IDEA, as far as present technology is concerned, is not vulnerable to brute-force attack, pure and simple.
Of course, the claim of vulnerability to brute force attack has lost validity, at least to some extent, since it's 'publication' in '96... The point is, that's a lot of keys. If I'm not mistaken, *any* primes in that range are potential keys. (any crypto experts out there?)
Also working in a "Micro$oft-only shop," I believe that there are really only a few relatively basic reasons for their dominance.
First and foremost always seems to be "support". Talk to any Micro$oft rep/team leader about linux, and the first question/bitch about it is "well, yeah, it may be cool, but who supports it?" As if it's not obvious that *several* vendors compete for the best "linux support"... Red Hat, Caldera, Corel, Mandrake, etc. (please, no 'Mandrake is just red hat!' or 'that's not a real distro!'... I don't know what a real distro is anymore, except debian and slakware...)
The "support" issue comes up in other places too. For example, I write software (database frontends) mostly in Visual Basic and ASP. Why? Do I actually like them (and active-x for that matter) better than C++/Perl/PHP/Python?
No, not really. It's because "Someone may have to support your code in the future!" Visual Basic really isn't all that more standard than C++, but I keep being told that "The next guy might not be as bright as you, and, well, the company would be in deep water if nobody is able to support the data warehouse!" I just learned VB three months ago... I doubt they would ever end up with a less experienced programmer than me... and if they *did*, 90% of all formal CS training in college is done in C++ anyway.
Another very common reason here is interopterability. (sp? ehh?) Linux office apps are either "too immature" or "don't work together" or are "too hard to figure out".
Please. ApplixWare and StarOffice both pretty damn intuitive, I think. Office components in both seem to play with each other. Sure there are some bugs, but there are also bugs in M$ products. Many exec/mgmt people are under the delusion that failings in compatibility between Office/Outlook/IE-based-DBMS's are due to "too much load", or "too many people on the localnet" etc., rather than inherent flaws. Just the same types of comments ISP tech support gets when IE or Dial-Up Networking doesn't bring their e-mail quickly enough.
There is, of course, the issue of familiarity that Picass0 brought up in the previous post. Lastly, most M$ products we use are entrenched in the system because of some obscure feature that is "absolutely necessary" and "you can't do with linux/apache/mysql".
Of course, mail service/external www/dns is all done on a couple of linux boxes...
So the question is really, what the heck is "support"? The ability to rewrite my code, or fix desktops? Deploy new versions of shit on our customer service stations? Worse yet, how can it be provided satisfactorily for linux if it means something different every time it is used in conversation? Hell if I know...