Doomsday Projections- Indiatimes Editorial

This is the best piece of news I have heard in days. Encryption is interesting. This is even more...

FROM TIMES OF INDIA Dt. 11/08/04

No cyber-encryption is safe any longer Prime numbers — stuff that people, unless they happen to be maths freaks, forget the moment they leave high school — are numbers like 3, 5, 7, 11, etc, that are only divisible by themselves and 1. Mathematicians have known for more than 2,000 years that there's no limit to prime numbers; they extend to infinity interspersed among other numbers with apparently no pattern to their preponderance, becoming only less common as they grow bigger. But Bernhard Riemann, a 19th century German mathematician, thought otherwise. In 1859, he proposed a conjecture which, in effect, suggested that primes are actually in regular distribution despite their seemingly random occurrence on the number line. However, since Riemann could offer no proof, his hypothesis soon came to be regarded as one of the most subtle and difficult of unsolved mathematical problems.
Now it seems that a Purdue University mathematician in the United States may have proved the hypothesis. Although Prof Louis De Branges's proof hasn't been published in peer-reviewed journals yet, the fact that he might be correct isn't exactly being received with the kind of excitement usually reserved for seminal scientific breakthroughs. The reason is simple. As long as prime numbers were random they could be used as master codes in all manner of modern applications of data encryption security techniques, ranging from banking and e-business to credit card exchanges and money transfers on the Internet. Once that randomness is disproved, though, all hell is going to break loose, with no code being safe any longer and no Internet transaction protected against fraudulent hacking and entry. In fact, chances are the whole of e-commerce, which is dependent on prime numbers, could be compromised and brought to its knees. Some people are even saying it's going to be the economic equivalent of an asteroid hitting the Earth.