For years the governments have controled what level security encryption schemes are allowed to be sold to the public.

In the days of Julius Ceasar, he used square ciphers to send secret messages from one place to another.

Other known ciphers which have been used in history are:

1) where people substitute A for a number
2) substute A = Z, B = Y, etc

In WWII, the Americans had already cracked the Japanese's cipher codes and were intercepting the messages ensuring victory in the Pacific.

Nowadays we use complicated encryption algorithms which use very long prime numbers as the key. (for example if a prime number which is 100 digits long was used as the encryption key in a PKE algorithm it would take a standard 2GHz computer about 1000 years to crack the code)

Modern advanced encryption algorithms use prime numbers ranging from 1000 digits or longer. Groups of mathematicians spend hours calculating long prime numbers to be used as Encryption Keys.

Other forms of encryptions involve using randomly generated signals (usually copied from static interference in weather patterns), use of one time pads (encryption key and plain text pairs which were used only once and discarded), frequency hopping in wireless signals, etc.

Even Binary Code, Hexidecimal Code and Octal Codes are a form of Cipher Encryption.

And countries such as France fearing for national security have laws that state it is illegal for any person to encrypt their e-mail messages.

Well these are just brief parts in the history of encryption.

Well do you think we (the average person) would have use for any type of encryption in their daily lives?

Don't include stuff like credit card information, bank details, etc in the discussion because most of use would generally agree that it is necessary in these cases, however those encryptions are provided for us by banks and websites which deal with monetary transactions, we don't need to come up or purchase our own encryption algorithms.

Well, we all have things we don't really want people to find out, but I can't see any point in encrypting a diary, for instance.
In day to day life [not including monetary transactions] I can see little to no use for enycrption of data.

In my daily work, I use the md5 encryption, I use md5 in passwords of databases.

for example:

7242d6c91121f8e2e87803855c028e55

is the md5 encryption of nirvana.

It is very useful because it is important to preserve any confidential data.

I also use encryption schemes in my everyday website design and databasing work that I do. It's really important to me that I can encrypt anything I want, and to be quite honest, the Government (in my case, the USA) has no right to take that away from me without due cause. Read the 4th Amendment and you'd understand why alot of people are angry with the USA PATRIOT Act. Same principle applies to restricting encryption, which is a facet of privacy and is an inalienable right because of that.

OH yes we do use codes of course. But only on small matters. Like when girls gossip right in front of the people they dislike, they use code to malign and then giggle. I do not understand why some people do that since if you gossip about people right in fron of them and don't want them to know, then it would be better to gossip behind their back. People sometimes do nonsensical things I guess.
Other type of code is when someone prevents another to tell something he/she shouldn't say. Like my brother kick me under the table right before I slip something important to my parents. I'm not a good secret keeper, someone told me something and I would accidentally said it out right away.

I dont get the whole code thing. How do people understand it? It may be my lack of better english but it looks so confusing. Isn't it usually just governments that use secret code encrpytions? I always wonder what secrets are hidden in them.

I use alphabets of other countries to substitute some of the stuff I write. Basically it's in English. The only things that have changed are the letters and some punctuation marks.

I use stuff like this when I'm writing down stuff for my stories while I'm in school. Some of my classmates are nosy, and so I'd rather not have them understanding my work - I'm usually not in the mood for answering any questions they might have. XD So it's more as a trivial use - almost a hobby - than out of actual necessity.

Humm, encryption is a fascinating topic.

There are lots of ways that someone can very securely hide information using modern cryptology, and in most cases it's pretty easy. For example: a program called Tor (it stands for "The Onion Router") can hide your internet traffic, a program called Truecrypt can hide files, and a program called PGP can hide messages (PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy", which is a little ironic because the privacy that it provides is a heck of a lot better then "pretty good"). With freely available tools like this it is surprisingly easy for the average person to provide themselves with the sort of protection that used to only be available to governments not long ago.

This also brings up some interesting concerns, what happens when people have the power to hide these things from there governments? Some would argue that this sort of thing helps out the "bad guy" the most.

Myself? I personally believe the "you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide" argument is fundamentally flawed, tough, that's a debate for a different thread. Everyone has he right to privacy, from both there peers and there governments; no matter how sensitive or mundane the information. I'm a university student, and live in a house with 3 other guys on a street full of other university students. I don't like to leave anything to chance as far as privacy goes. That's not to say I go so far as to encrypt my web traffic or email, but I've locked down our wireless network very tightly and I use secure passwords on my computers. Sometimes you just need to weigh security vs convenience. In a lot of cases (like locking down our wireless) the convenience cost is negligible while the security benefit is great indeed.

I guess my point is, everyone has the right to be secure, and while you may or may not actually have anything to worry about, a little piece of mind is nice to have. Then again, my roommates say I'm paranoid.

Rarely use. Except for some programming stuffs. Anyway, I think compressing your files counts as encrypting as well...

Compressing your files doesn't actually count as encrypting, because compressing is just what it sounds like: making stuff smaller. Instead of data being replaced for something else to hide its real nature [encryption], data is eliminated or simply shortened to use less resources [compression].

I think you're right. A friend of mine said that the method of compressing is much the same as encrypting. Both made the files unable to be accessed without the appropriate key/decipher/decompression. But I guess it's different after all..

Well, tell him to do this: use Notepad to open a .zip file. Right away, he will be able to see the files that are inside the .zip so... that defeats his idea of compression as encryption :3

Lol. I'll do just that. :)