We'll be meeting tonight, the first day of Kwanza.  We didn't have a meeting yesterday since it was x-mas, Chipotle's was closed, it was raining, and it seemed like everyone was busy anyway.

BTW, we'll probably have some tech stuff tonight.  I'll also explain some differences between XFS and EXT2/3/4 so people can make the most of their hardware.  I'm also curious as to how many people currently support XFS.

Yeah, I know the notice if pretty late (4 hours before the meeting), but I think word crept through IRC and then via the grapevine to the regulars.

I gave a little demo of how to derive a private RSA key from someone's 256-bit public RSA key a while back.  If one takes this exercise to the next level and attempts to break a 512-bit key, they should get a feel for how things scale.

A 1024-bit key is not going to be broken in a reasonable amount of time on standard computers.  There are the paranoid people who think that even 4096-bit keys are easily broken by "the government."  I haven't seen any proof, and it would either take a very large amount of CPU power (i.e. quantum computers, and other things which haven't become a reality yet) and/or a revolutionary algorithm which has eluded all mathimatitions for literally thousands of years.  In thier defense though, it wouldn't be public knowledge if someone did find a way.  And it's better to error on the safe side.

Bruce Schneier's take
Not even slashdot says it's feasible
426-bit key broken in 5000 MIPS-years

I hope the skeptics continue to support encryption; without it we know we're wide open for any MiM to take the data; with it we at least have a chance at gaining some privacy.  At a minimum it would severely limit the number of people who could read the encrypted message, and isn't that worth the trouble of clicking the encrypt button and entering your passphrase?

The files from my demo:  dc949_rsa_cracking.tar.bz2