I wrote:

> > https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/232.pdf
>
> Snakes. Oil. (**COUGH** Theranos **COUGH**)
> We've been here before with Crown Sterling.

Sorry, I take that back, having just assumed this was the Crown Sterling
guys (again). The current claim is _not_ from Crown Sterling
but rather from serious mathematician and cryptographer Claus Peter
Schnorr, who claims that prime factorization can be reduced to a much
less intractable ‘shortest vector’ problem.

My offhand reaction is that Schnorr's claim of greater efficacy
has not yet been comprehensively demonstrated much less proven, so
we will have to see whether the alleged advance in cryptoanalysis
proves out in the real world. As this paper is only two days old,
that skeptical evaluation has only now just started.

(I haven't worked on number theory in decades, and so cannot comment
even if I hadn't just now cracked open the abstract of Schnorr's paper.)