>>>>>>Yeah I know this one belongs in the Internet Forum, but it's a waste land over there and this is bugging me :)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>What's the difference between http and https (that I see some urls beginning with nowadays)? TIA!
>>>>>
>>>>>Roxanne,
>>>>>
>>>>>all the other guys said is right, but not clear enough for me. When having a connection with https protocol, then your browser will encrypt the data before sending it to the webserver. The data on the net is (theoretically) sure because encrypted. In the US you have an 128 bit key for encryption, here in Europe only a 40 bit key (easy to crack)..
>>>>
>>>> wouldn't go so far as to say "Easy to crack". Netscape sponsored a contest some months ago to see if anyone could crack a single 40 bit encrypted message. The only guy that was able to do it used 20 high powered desktop machines linked together and had them cranking for over 3 weeks. he cracked that one message, but to crack another, it would take another 3 weeks. I wouldn't call that "easy".
>>>>
>>>>128 bit is for all practical purposes, impossible to crack.
>>>
>>>Ok, Ok Erik, you're right, I now it took them 3 weeks and each new message will take the same amount of time, maybe I exagerated a bit. But how about an organisation wich regular interest in cracking messages, with far more powerfull computers, evan specially designed hardware ???
>>
>>I think that that is why it is difficult to get 128 bit in other countries. This is probably a government stipulation: US CIA and NSA don't want foreign people using an encryption algorithm that they can't crack...
>>
>>I'm sure a couple of Crays could tackle the same problem in a matter of hours- but most of us don't need to worry about people with Crays reading our e-mail...
>
>Who knows .... You're certainly right, probably not a concern for normal people. I thought about specialy built hardware, dedicated only for this kind of nummerical crunching and with cheap processors (like 8051, strong arm - i don't know which is faster for numerical computations). 15 years ago a guy has built a computer with 128 very cheap processors, optimized only for computing the Mandelbrot set. Something like this. If this discussion will continue and if I'll find the spare time it will determine me to try such a construction :-))).

Just a few months ago, IBM put together a demo to show off the capabilities of Red Hat Linux- they linked 117 netfinity servers with 36 PII processors linked via 100 MB ethernet all running linux and tied the PovRay benchmark processing record previously set by a Cray T3t-900-AC64. A Cray costs $5.5 Million, and IBM tied the processing speed with $150,000 worth of hardware.

I don't have any idea if this has an impact on the safety of 128 bit encrypted data, but it is certainly something to think about when discussing sheer processing power.