You've heard of Trojan horses? How about Trojan grids?

Over the weekend, fellow ZDNet blogger George Ou wrote to me to say I might be interested some math he did in a recent blog — math that for fun, I'm now calling George's Law. George's Law appears in his blog about certain types of WiFi access points and how long their user-defined pass phrases should be in order to minimize the chances of a hacker gaining access to information that was thought to be protected through encryption. The blog itself is worth a read if you've got consumer grade WiFi access points that you think you've secured. But what was even more interesting to me was how, in a chart, he did some math to show how long it would take for a hacker to crack your security based on the number of computers that the hacker used to work on the problem. For example, if your pass phrase is 7 alphanumeric characters long, it would take .01 years (3.65 days) to crack your pass phrase if a hacker had 1000 computers noodling on the problem. With a 10 character pass phrase length and one computer working on the problem, it would take 580,000 years.