Before the new regulations, companies were forced to obtain a license from the U.S. government to export encryption products higher than 56 bits in key length.

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DES, developed by IBM Corp. and adopted by NIST in 1977, has only one key size -- 56 bits, which is the length of the encryption algorithm.

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This deluge of data can only be managed with more and bigger routers and switches, such as Cisco's Nexus 7000, which can handle 15 trillion bits, the equivalent of 1, 350 feature-length films, every second.

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For a metropolis twice the size of another, the length of electric cables, number of gas stations and other bits of infrastructure decrease by about 15% per inhabitant.

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Soon that capacity will hit 15 trillion bits, meaning that the switch could spew out the equivalent of 400 feature-length movies every second.

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