@SluggerCheck your PM inbox.Also, to anybody confused by eJ3k1 and Shannon's discussion regarding key length, a 1024 bit PGP key is considered small today, but the prime numbers used in those keys are still very large.Here's an example to show you what I mean.000 That is a binary number above, it is 0 in a 3 bit space.Here are the possible permutations within that 3 bit memory:000100110111001010011101Altogether you have 8 possible patterns you can fit into 3 bits of memory. Remember a bit is short hand for 'binary digit'.This means you can represent 8 numbers from zero to seven. It could represent 8 flavors of jelly jean if you so choose (yum!) but we are thinking of that space as representing numbers instead (to the detriment of science progress *stomach growls*).Now, a 1024 bit key, uses a 1024 bit space in which to store a number.That means there are: 161521746670640296426473658228859984306663144318152681524054709078245736590366297248377298082656939330673286493230336261991466938596691073112968626710792148904239628873374506302653492009810626437582587089465395941375496004739918498276676334238241465498030036586063929902368192004233172032080188726965600617167 possible numbers in that 1024 bits of memory. Big space. Lots of huge prime aggressor beasts in the numba jungle.Anyway if you then multiply two large prime numbers from that set of that size you get a much bigger number. In order to obtain the private key I believe (correct me if I'm wrong here gang) you'll need to factorize that big number to obtain the prime numbers. That is if you are using brute force it means you'll be doing about a gazillion (that I believe is the scientific term) divisions to work out what primes made that composite number.To put this in some perspective, in 2009 several cryptanalysts factored a 232 digit number, using hundreds of machines over 2 years (the number above is 309 digits long and you haven't even seen the length of the prime multiplication yet).Anyway, nobody needs to know this stuff to actually use PGP (which is why I put this at the end, haha!)But seriously, while PGP is good, it behoove us to not become complacent, cryptography is a field in which sudden sweeping changes can occur like earthquakes if a new mathematical breakthrough is made. Eventually we'll probably move on to ECC crypto which has more advantages over RSA.If Louis is about I'd be interested to hear his thoughts on ECC and whether there is any good open source implementations as of yet.The main advantage of ECC (ECC club coming soon to a black market darknet near you!) is the public keys are a lot shorter in size. The reason why this is good is because in the near future quantum computers will almost certainly eventually weaken existing public key cryptography by reducing its power by half. As such, everybody will double their PGP key sizes to counteract that technology, but this becomes severely unwieldy when everybody is using 16kb keys or greater, not something you can causally pop onto a forum post or write in a letter.