Some German researchers have successfully factored a 200 digit number from the RSA factor challenge. If you don’t know cryptography, you might be inclined to say, “factoring is easy, why is this such a big deal?” If you really believe that, I encourage you to check out the new RSA Factoring Challenge. Pick a number that strikes your fancy, factor it and make yourself some “easy” money. There’s still $625,000 out there to be claimed, all you have to do is factor 9 different numbers of increasing size (the smallest is 640 bits, the largest is 2,048 bits).
I still want to believe there’s a silver bullet to this problem, because otherwise the problem just isn’t that interesting (just a matter of how much hardware you can throw at it).