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[isthisthingon]

I disagree here. It's going to be easier than you think. We have all the tools needed and right now it's our own fault if we can't make it happen.

Rereading what I wrote I realized it was not what I meant.  I don't mean that the grassroots will be required to make anything happen at all for this change.  What I mean is that the shift that has already begun - and continues to be the most economically disruptive force perhaps in my lifetime - is coming not from the 100lb gorillas of capitalism, but from the collective strength of contributors to a new form of innovation and productivity in general.

It's as if the lessons we learned about cracking 128bit encryption - once touted as impossible within our lifetime by IBM and other mainframe headed companies - through massive Internet distribution of small slices of the work needed to crack the code (110 year estimate accomplished in 11 days if I'm not mistaken), was partially incorporated into the emerging new era of commerce and society.

The pyramids are crumbling fast as the individual emerges as the dominant unit of society

Now that's book-worthy 

[kurdt]

It's as if the lessons we learned about cracking 128bit encryption - once touted as impossible within our lifetime by IBM and other mainframe headed companies - through massive Internet distribution of small slices of the work needed to crack the code (110 year estimate accomplished in 11 days if I'm not mistaken), was partially incorporated into the emerging new era of commerce and society.

Is 256bit still uncracked?

[isthisthingon]

Is 256bit still uncracked?

Have no idea.  Actually my reference was an analogy and regarding the specifics I'm probably off.  It was in the mid nineties when a "longer than lifetime" challenge was accepted by an Internet community of participants who bitch-slapped the IBM assertion, since at the time the most powerful mainframe couldn't get the job done within our lifetime.  Thanks to the word spreading quickly (kudos Internet) the participant group also grew exponentially, and won 

256 is a stoopidly huge task for a brute force attack since it's on an exponential scale.  I'd love to hear if anyone else out there has an update on this. 

[vsloathe]

I don't talk a lot about security in the open here, but I'll say that brute force is hugely wasteful when you're up against any sort of modern encryption.

But consider this: Every modern encryption algorithm contains within it the seeds of its own undoing. Further, most of them that are worth using are open source. Just sayin' 

[isthisthingon]