a glob of nerdishness

Ok, I’ll admit I don’t know much about this, so I don’t entirely know how critical this is, but apparently SHA-1 has been cracked:

• The Epoch Times | Chinese Professor Cracks Fifth Data Encryption Algorithm
• Slashdot has some interesting comments regarding the reliability of The Epoch Times, the fact that this happened 2 years ago, that SHA-1 isn’t in itself an encryption scheme, and that problems with SHA-1 were already known: Chinese Prof Cracks SHA-1 Data Encryption Scheme
• Wikipedia has some more information about SHA, including mention that MD5 and SHA-1 are reportedly compromised: SHA hash functions

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