All the crypto texts all admonish everyone to remember the impact of Moore's Law. I just re-read
Diamond Age and it has a reference to increasing key length to keep ahead of advances in computational capacity.
In the two years since the academic "break" we've gone from Virtex 4 to Virtex 5. The number of chips required to build a breaking engine has been reduced to the point that someone could put it on their Visa Gold card.
As with the number of x86 disassembler people vs ARM disassembler people, how many folks can program a Virtex 5 to attack SHA-1?
If you are interested, this paper speaks to using hash collisions to recover private keys:
http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~yiqun/H...intVersion.pdf