... and the world could well have been unsafer. There is pretty strong reason not to release insights which could be used as an attack on public key cryptography. We already know the fix anyway, post quantum cryptography algorithms.

Sometimes scientific curiosity has to step back when it comes to potentially dangerous research. Scott Aaronson recently [1] compared this case to when scientists stopped publishing on nuclear fission research because the possibility of developing an atomic bomb became concrete:

> When I got an early heads-up about these results—especially the Google team’s choice to “publish” via a zero-knowledge proof—I thought of Frisch and Peierls, calculating how much U-235 was needed for a chain reaction in 1940, but not publishing it, even though the latest results on nuclear fission had been openly published just the year prior.

1: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665