This is an announcement for the paper "Maharam's problem" by Michel Talagrand. Abstract: We construct an exhaustive submeasure that is not equivalent to a measure. This solves problems of J. von Neumann (1937) and D. Maharam (1947). Archive classification: Functional Analysis Mathematics Subject Classification: 28A12 The source file(s), s1.TEX: 75873 bytes, is(are) stored in gzipped form as 0601689.gz with size 23kb. The corresponding postcript file has gzipped size 105kb. Submitted from: spinglass@talagrand.net The paper may be downloaded from the archive by web browser from URL http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/math.FA/0601689 or http://arXiv.org/abs/math.FA/0601689 or by email in unzipped form by transmitting an empty message with subject line uget 0601689 or in gzipped form by using subject line get 0601689 to: math@arXiv.org.