The SHA-1 encryption, now widely used for most cryptology applications, has been broken by a faster method, with research done by Xiaoyun Wang, Andrew Yao and Frances Yao. The new method can crack the encryption in 2⁶³, just slightly better than their previous effort of 2⁶⁹, and better than the brute force method of 2⁸⁰. The researches said that over the coming month they will revise their work to possbily improve it.

I’m still surprised that most things (including the US govenment and SSL) still use SHA-1, and haven’t moved onto a variant of SHA-2 (eg: SHA-384, SHA-512, etc.).

Google has recently updated and added new data for over 100 cities in their Google Earth program. In this it includes the Washington DC area, and Google has forgotten to erase out the roof of the white-house (which they have done previously).

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