That is one huge number...6,632,430 digits long to be exact. The above number was found November 17th by Michael Shafer, a Michigan State University graduate student, and is the largest prime number found (so far). The number is only the 40th . . . . That is one huge number...6,632,430 digits long to be exact. The above number was found November 17th by Michael Shafer, a Michigan State University graduate student, and is the largest prime number found (so far). The number is only the 40th Mersenne prime number discovered, and is the sixth found during the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) distributed computing project (yes, Prime95 has other uses than a PC torture test!). News of the find became official when the prime was verified independently by two different machines. The article located at arsTechnica is no longer available. . That is one huge number...6,632,430 digits long to be exact. The above number was found November 17t. number, digits, exact, above, found, november. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Will Manindra Agrawal bring about the end of the Internet as we know it? The question is not as ridiculous as it was just two months ago. Prof. Agrawal is a 36-year old theoretical computer scientist at the Indian Institute of . . . . Will Manindra Agrawal bring about the end of the Internet as we know it? The question is not as ridiculous as it was just two months ago. Prof. Agrawal is a 36-year old theoretical computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. In August, he solved a problem that had eluded millennia of mathematicians: developing a method to determine with complete certainty if a number is prime. Prime numbers are those divisible only by themselves and 1. While small primes like 5 or 17 are easy to spot, for very large numbers, those hundreds of digits long, there never had been a formula of "primality testing" that didn't have a slight chance of error. That encryption system takes two big, and secret, prime numbers and multiplies them. For a bad guy to decrypt your message, he'd need to take the product of that multiplication and figure out the two prime numbers used to generate it. It's called the "factoring problem," and fortunately it's something no one on Earth knows how to do quickly. A speedy method of factoring would make existing Internet security useless, not a pleasant thought in this Internet age. The link for this article located at msnbc is no longer available. . Will Manindra Agrawal bring about the end of the Internet as we know it? The question is not as ridi. manindra, agrawal, bring, about, internet, question. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
The Pythagoreans were reputed, whether rightly or wrongly, to be a shamanistic cult which jealously guarded the higher mysteries of mathematical knowledge to maintain social power and political influence in their day. Of course they weren't as advanced as we are; . . . . The Pythagoreans were reputed, whether rightly or wrongly, to be a shamanistic cult which jealously guarded the higher mysteries of mathematical knowledge to maintain social power and political influence in their day. Of course they weren't as advanced as we are; so we have every confidence that the liberal spirit of scientific inquiry to which our technology establishment nobly aspires will prevail over puling self-interest in the case of a remarkably large prime number used to encode the infamous, and illegal, DeCSS utility with which DVD encryption can be defeated (and the entire entertainment industry annihilated, we're warned). Mathematician Phil Carmody worked it out, and in so doing discovered a prime number over one thousand digits in length, which qualifies it as a worthy object of inquiry in and of itself. The link for this article located at TheRegister is no longer available. . The Pythagorean school safeguarded its mathematical insights, cherishing their sacred power akin to prime numbers in DVD encryption today, securing data and intellectual property. DVD Decryption, Prime Number Theory, Information Security, Digital Rights Management. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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