This came across the Interesting-People list today: a preliminary draft of a paper, co-authored by Adi Shamir, that proposes new hardware for factoring large numbers. It is claimed that a machine could be built which would be "3-4 orders of magnitude more cost effective than the best previously published designs," and that "the NFS sieving step for 1024-bit RSA keys can be completed in less than a year by a $10M device." For background, here's a primer on key length in symmetric and asymmetric crypto.

Slashdot | DDoS for Fun and Profit.

First there's the Microsoft worm, reported earlier, which in addition to all the other damage has apparently knocked Microsoft's Windows XP activation servers (and Bank of America ATMs) off the net. Then we've got a report about the ongoing demise of DALnet, perhaps not the way we expected it to go. And Canada discovers a risk of online voting.

Slashdot | Register your own .mil Domain.

JWSmythe writes " As reported in This Story at theregister.co.uk ,and on dailyrotten.com, it seems the US Department of Defense has dropped the ball. Not only can you register a .mil domain, but you can find "secret" domains that aren't publically known (the gov't uses security through obscurity?). I'm looking forward to hacker.mil, warez.mil, and porn.mil."