Basically since the FBI wants to do away with encryption I feel its more important now than ever to look in to this and find a good open source encryption software to both use and hopefully contribute some code to.
By no means an expert in this matter but I've heard PGP is good for text and files. As for hard drive encryption I have no idea anymore. It used to be Trucrypt but that is no longer supported and it's advised to avoid at all costs.
For what purpose? Encrypting individual files and messages? Disk encryption?
For every day encryption, signing, key management you want GnuPG
Both really, I'll check out GPG fore sure.
While prime factoring is still fashionable the RSA algortithm and pretty good privacy are still usable. It is conceivable that Quantum computers with a 1000 or so qubits could make prime factoring irrelevant to encryption. I believe that large keys in the elliptic curve space might outpace quantum processors for a long while or at least longer than I have left.