[mox1]

Are you serious?

Realistically, these are bits of a video stream, not your bitcoin wallet or some other bits where security it of the upmost concern. Were talking millions of dollars of equipment to find a collision in SHA1 today....

How exactly is a 160 bit hash too short? Collisions can be had after 2^80 trys in naive scenario and 2^57.5 with an active attacker, not exactly easy...

[amluto]

Torrents can be, and often are, executable. Many Linux distributions are available over Bittorrent, for example.

Breaking crypto, especially new crypto, should pass a much higher bar than "not exactly easy". 2^57.5 is not all that large by the standards of a big cloud provider or a government.

[Gurkenmaster]

It's not new. The document was created in 2009.

[mox1]

Again "not exactly easy" today will cost you > $1 MILLION dollars, you are greatly exaggerating the actual problem.

If you have millions of dollars to spend and want to commit digital crimes, there are better methods than flipping bits in torrents......

[wereHamster]

$1 million today, at the cost of the average PC in a couple years. Think of the future.

[spacemanmatt]

Think of the adversary, too.