Finding MD5 Collisions With Chinese Lottery

Stanislav Shalunov writes "Jean-Luc Cooke posted a Usenet article describing a distributed webpage-based effort (Chinese Lottery) to find a collision in the MD5 function. All you need to do to participate in the effort is visit the URL that loads the code. The author comments: 'What is interesting about this approach - when we reach final release stage - is that any website that adds this small snippet of code to their pages will have their visitors working on the problem for the duration of their visit to the site'."

Re:Are there any known MD5 collisions today?

[mattdm]

Well, if there were, that'd make the question this project is trying to answer remarkably easy.

Hmmm.

[valkraider]

Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these things... It would be the same as if Slashdot put the applet in the header or something - all of us geeks computing stuff for free... That would be a lot of computing, I think a couple people visit slashdot daily!

bitch, bitch, bitch

[Anonymous Coward]

First thing it does when the applet loaded was to bitch at me for not accepting cookies. Just like my wife.

./ effect = benefit??

[bluelip]

put the snippet on slashdot.org. The collisions should all be found within an hour.

Normal Thread Priority

[cybermancer]

Interesting idea, but most distributed computing tasks that run in the background run at low priority. Since this is running inside your browser (more or less) it will run at the priority of the browser. Unless your browser is running at low priority then this process will push all the lower priority processes out of process cycles.

This could prevent contact with ET!

the slashdot effect

[Peeet]

It's about time that the monster (us) is used for good and not evil.

Oooh! I thought of another way...
Just Click here. [sco.com]

-P

Great, GREAT idea.

[SargeZT]

I nearly got suspended from school because I installed seti@home on all the machines. With this, I can still maintain my EVIL distributed computing campaign, and do it without them knowing!

New buisness plan

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Create very small website with CPU draining applet and post a link to said website to Slashdot.
2. ??
3. Profit!

Re:./ effect = benefit??

[TCM]

What's this Dotslash you talk about?

Re:RFI: "collision" means?

[Anonymous Coward]

If two strings produce the same md5 hash, the universe ends. This project should probably be stopped.

Re:Not very intensive.

[LucidityZero]

No, no. You're wrong. IE 6.0 just hogs all resources by default.

Wow. Something where a slashdotting

[jtnishi]

is a good thing.

CORRECTION

[MyHair]

Obviously, since a string can be an almost infinite length, there has *got* to be collisions somewhere, but so far, no one has found any.

Correction: No one has reported any. I, uh, have a friend--yeah, that's it--who found a few collisions but is afraid to report them because it always occurs between his beastiality files and his lengthy and frequent poetic love letters to some girl who claims he's stalking her.

Re:Hey Sarge...

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to check your webpage, man. The index file is missing, and among the directory listing is at least one file which reveals your MySQL password.

Don't worry. I fixed it for him ;)