The standard advice for many years regarding compression and encryption has been that the encryption strength of zip is bad.

Is this really the case in this day and age?

I read this article about WinZip (it has had the same bad reputation). According to that article the problem is removed provided you follow a few rules when choosing your password.

1. At least 12 characters in length
2. Be random not contain any dictionary, common words or names
3. At least one Upper Case Character
4. Have at least one Lower Case Character
5. Have at least one Numeric Character
6. Have at least one Special Character e.g. $,£,*,%,&,!

This would result in roughly 475,920,314,814,253,000,000,000 possible combinations to brute force

Please provide recent (say past five years) links to back up your information.