don't you dare piss off a generation of calcers, jacquesm ;-) this is our holly grail, there are many others like it, but this is ours.

[Edit: inserted smiley so not to appear "touchy" :-P ]

Not trying to piss of anybody (wow, you're touchy).

I just think that you're putting the bar for immortality a little low here. Brute forcing a key is not exactly rocket science.

Congratulations though :)

edit: smiley duly noted.

edit2: now if only the downmods would grow a sense of humor too :)

Running the general number field sieve is not exactly brute forcing. IMHO, understanding and tuning an algorithm as complicated as the GNFS is pretty close to rocket science. Not as close as actually inventing it or writing the code yourself, but this is more than just writing a short program to try all combinations.

Understanding and tuning an algorithm once somebody has devised it may be complicated, but coming up with the method in the first place is where the real work lies.

Anybody can do cool stuff with the jpeg library for instance, but the first guy to take DCTs and apply them to image compression was the real hero.

Unfortunately it is very rare to see the people that come up with an algorithm (if it isn't named after them) achieve 'hero' status (Hoare ? Knuth ?) other than in the circle of hackers.

Implementing and applying those algorithms and getting publicity around it will do wonders though.

Anyway, I seem to be unable to get my point across so I'll leave it at that.

Edit: To put it in one line: Hurley and Chen are 'heros', Tom Lane is a footnote.

But without Tom Lane Hurley and Chen would be a lot less rich than they are today.

Hurley and Chen are YouTube founders. Tom Lane organized the Independent JPEG Group, which isn't the group that designed JPEG (that group is called "JPEG") but rather an author of some important open-source JPEG software. What's the relationship?

He didn't implement the GNFS; he used GGNFS and MSieve.