This is probably not old news to most readers of The Economist.

It's also not useful to most readers of The Economist, since nothing they commonly use relies on MD5.

The Economist is basically general interest stuff for smart people. They seem to like that sort of thing.

Yeah, there is a bunch of news there that's not personally that relevant to me, but I like reading it just the same, being a bit of an information junkie.

Yeah, my first move on seeing this article was to scan it for mention of the fact that there are other hash algorithms than MD5 which still work perfectly well.

I don't think this article would be bad if it had a second page that went on to provide some perspective. As it stands, it reads as a general indictment of all of computer security. They claim that the methods are secure, but they're really not! Don't trust those computer guys, because the One True Algorithm has a hole!

At the risk of being a Reddit pedant: it's not really true that there are other reasonable safe hash algorithms. We're in a bit of a hash crisis now; SHA1 is expected to fall too, SHA256 is unreasonably expensive, and no alternative algorithm has the peer results to allay concerns. So, I guess there is an article you could write about the situation.

But, of course, it has nothing yet to do with the Internet; SSL/TLS uses both MD5 and SHA1, simultaneously.

The moral of this story is that I'd rather read your article than the Economist's. :)