Comments on: No, Primes with Millions of Digits Are Not Useful for Cryptography

By: Nathaniel

Nathaniel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:01:00 +0000

@Nathan - Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing for such a mistake to be made on ScienceNews of all places. Such a mistake I could potentially see just being someone's mind going to sleep while typing that sentence (as opposed to flat-out making stuff up like some other sources), but it's a little sad that it made it past whatever editor they have there.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:47:08 +0000

I assume ScienceNews.org means: “Cryptographic systems rely on the challenge of factoring numbers which are the product of two large primes.” This is something else that the media almost always messes up, but give the overall level of math illiteracy in media, I suppose it’s not that surprising.