> I realise that a lot of what is contributed is going to be used in
> encryption et.al...
> Since I am based in Europe, and denied certain facilities
> from the web as to
> U.S. encryption bit encoding ( U.S. and Canada keeping it for
> themselves..?!)...
> Is their an auterior motive behind this...???????
The types of primes found by GIMPS are so incredibly huge that they would
have no practical purpose for encryption. Besides, with only 37 known
Mersenne Primes, any key generated using even 1 Mersenne Prime would be
easily decrypted since there are only 37 divisors you'd have to go through.
Practical encryption uses much smaller primes, of which there are many, but
still large enough that factoring the product of 2 primes would take much
too long to be practical.
The RC5 cracking project, on the other hand, is specifically targetted at
decryption and has, IMO, been quite successful at forcing the US gov't. to
open their eyes to how incredibly weak 40/56/even 64 bit encryption is, and
has probably been a major catalyst in the US finally allowing certain
permissions for higher bit encryption to be exported.
What's really retarded about the US is that the algorithms for such
encryption are very well known, programs that do high bit encryption are
available all over the world, by non-US software authors, and it just seems
silly to continue classifying high encryption as a munition.
About as silly as those Mac G4 commercials claiming that the G4 is
considered a munition because of it's processing capability, or the rumours
that <whatever that new game console was> is a munition for the same reason.
Totally retarded. But hey, that my never humble opinion. :-)
Aaron
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