Bruce Schneier talks about the recent reported weaknesses in common hash functions such as MD5. He writes:

As a user of cryptographic systems -- as I assume most readers are -- this news is important, but not particularly worrisome. MD5 and SHA aren't suddenly insecure. No one is going to be breaking digital signatures or reading encrypted messages anytime soon with these techniques. The electronic world is no less secure after these announcements than it was before.

However he says the writing is on the wall. The world has to move on to newer standards before the real breakthroughs in decryption occur.