Well, I kinda disagree. Encryption is important, especially if you work for government. I, quite personally, know that I don't want everyone in the world to know where we (the US) store our nukes. I also can live without every jerk on the street being able to crack the files containing my credit card number, my medical records, sappy love letters to women from mars.

A more interesting approach, would be, rather than finding all of the prime numbers, to find a quick way to factor the product of 2 prime numbers. That's the REAL killer app of cryptography. Do that and all modern encryption systems are rendered useless. What then? Well, then, probably, a few people will learn that you don't put systems requiring security onto the internet. Of course, then we have the problem of having a bunch of data that really SHOULD BE SECRET not being secret. Information wants to be free, but lets leave my love life out of this.

There ARE many algorithms to do this (search "sieve of erostothenes").

Just remember that storing any number of primes sufficient to crack current encryption standards would be futile. It would take terrabytes.

Just Another Perl Hacker