Brute force? My arse!

I can't agree with what Mad Mike is saying. There is not enough processing power on Earth to crack the strongest encryption, even with Moore's Law. Breaking 256 bit AES encryption with a 30 character or higher password runs into the order of taking thousands of years to break with conventional processing power - even a nine character password would take a 2GHz PC more than 90 years to break. Unless there is some profound weakness in encryption or unless computing power becomes orders of magnitude more powerful, many types of encryption will be safe for decades. Anyone looking for names and addresses would have more luck rummaging in bins than trying to break encryption.