And the article didn't really help. But, when dealing with the cryptography question it isn't really much about whether or not, the day after someone proves P = NP, all asymmetric crypto suddenly breaks. Most of it will probably still be usable. The problem is that polynomial problems grow much slower than, say, exponential problems, even with gigantic factors everywhere. So, the difference between a 768-bit key and a 1024-bit key, which today is astronomical(something in the 10^30 range), would be cut down to something that would probably be a little less. At some point, no matter what, there will always be a key size where the polynomial-time algorithm starts being faster than the exponential-time algorithm. And if there's one thing cryptographers don't like, it's when their cryptosystems stop working when the key size gets very large, because who says that in a hundred years we won't be using 10-billion-bit keys?There's a lot of confusion and misinformation about the P=NP problem.