RC5-64 Success 410
Peter Trei writes "After over four years of effort, hundreds of
thousands of participants, and millions of
cpu-hours of work, Distributed.net has brute forced the key to RSA Security's 64 bit encryption challenge, winning a US$10,000 prize. Still outstanding Challenges carry prizes as high as $200,000. RSA's PR release is here. d.net's site has not yet been updated." Update: 09/26 16:59 GMT by CN : The good folks over at SlashNET are having a forum with the distributed.net crew on Saturday at 21:00 UTC. It'll be a great time to meet some of the people who made this possible.
d.net's site update (Score:5, Informative)
No more RC5 in OpenBSD (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No more RC5 in OpenBSD (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone with a bit of skill can code their own RC5 code... I know I did [tom.iahu.ca] it. However, there are US patents on the RC5 algorithm...
Tom
Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh, it took a world-wide effort of thousands of computers over 1700 days. I don't think there is any debate at all; they proved the opposite of what they set out to prove.
Re:Heh ?? (Score:3, Informative)
That's the point.... is RC5-64 (effectively) safe today? It sure the heck is.. this project proved that! Will it be safe in 5 years? Heck no, and that was the point.
Let's check the math... (Score:2, Interesting)
Cracking RC5-64 took 384,000 computer/hours today. There are 168 hours in a week. So, for one computer to crack RC5-64 in a matter of weeks (less than five) would require a computer about 460 times faster than what we have now; assuming moore's law keeps going, we'll get those in about 13 years (2015).
In five years (48 months), computers will be about 2.6 times as fast powerful as they are now; it'll still take over 147,000 computer-hours to crack the same code; one computer would take 16 years to crack that.
(The same 2000 computers, once upgraded, could replicate their feat in a measly 654 days--still, two years.)
And, of course, this assumes that Moore's Law remains constant, there's no overhead, and distributed.net's brute force test is a good example; it could have gotten lucky, or it could have taken them an unusually short time to find the right code.
For a realisitic cracking scenerio, let's say our cracker has ten computers and wants to crack the code in a week... he'd still have to wait 8 years to be able to do it, and who'd want to bother with 13 year old data for cracking, anyway?
Re:Let's check the math... (Score:2, Interesting)
So, for one computer to crack RC5-64 in a matter of weeks (less than five) would require a computer about 460 times faster than what we have now; assuming moore's law keeps going, we'll get those in about 13 years (2015).
You forget THE major point of Distributed.net: distributed computing. If you put 2 computers to the task, you already cut by half the time needed. Have more money? Put 3000 CPUs (go read the nVidia and ATI tour at Anandtech to see if somebody can afford those now) through it, and the time will shrink by the same amount.
And regarding the time needed to crack it, I get a couple orders of magnitude greater than 384000 computer*hours. More akin to (quoting the PR) 46000*790*24=872 million computer*hour (using an Athlon XP 2GHz). A single CPU computer wouldn't be able to do it on a human scale time (would be about 100000 years), you absolutely need more than one computer to live to see the result.
For a realisitic cracking scenerio, let's say our cracker has ten computers and wants to crack the code in a week... he'd still have to wait 8 years to be able to do it, and who'd want to bother with 13 year old data for cracking, anyway?
I probably miss something about why the 8 years becomes 13, but there are some things that don't change in time, and could be used by somebody even in a few years. My credit card number hasn't changed since I first got it, same thing for my bank account. The goal is not for it to be secure only now, but also in the future. You may think about other examples involving national security if you prefer.
Re:Heh ?? (Score:2)
that laptop would have to run at about 30000000000MHz, assuming that (and this is probably low) 1000000 CPU years assuming PIII/500MHz were spent on this project...
Good luck finding one of those
G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?! (Score:3, Informative)
Am I missing something here? Are they claiming the 800mhz G4 is over 1.4 times as fast as an Athlon 2ghz??
Looks like the writer has been exposed to the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field" for a little too long...
Re:G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?! (Score:2, Interesting)
*also referred to as VMX by IBM and Velocity Engine by Apple
Re:G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?! (Score:4, Interesting)
I was able to do around 4 million keys/sec. He did around 2 million keys/sec. So, clock for clock, my computer was 4 times faster than his.
Yes, the advantage was because of the Velocity Engine(ake VMX aka AltiVec), but I does show the power of the G4 when it is programmed for correctly.
Re:G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I missing something here? Are they claiming the 800mhz G4 is over 1.4 times as fast as an Athlon 2ghz??
You're not missing anything. For some coursework when I was in school, I ended up sending some e-mail to the dnet staff. I mentioned that I needed to design a processor on an FPGA for a class, and asked what would be "ideal". They basically said, "Take Motorola's 7400 specs, that's the ideal processor."
The Velocity Engine / AltiVec / VMX engine really was good at processing multiple keys (2?) simultaneously, and conducting the XOR rotates in record clock cycles (if I remember correctly). The processor architecture itself is mostly 1993 technology (PowerPC 603), but the vector engine is what makes it worth its weight in sand for some specific tasks.
Now, what will I do with my dual 500MHz G4?
Re:Heh (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. If you consider that over 5 years, the average keyrate is 105.5 GKeys/sec, and the latest day averages were somewhere around 180 GKeys/sec, it means the same thing could have been finished in almost half the time, if it was started now with today's computers. Moore's law being what it is, if it really was started again now, it would take around half that time again, because more powerful CPUs are to be unveiled in that timeframe.
By their own estimates, it would take ~46000 Athlon XP 2GHz (now, where are you to find those right now?) to have 270 GKeys/sec (their peak rate in 5 years), which gives completing the keyspace in 790 days. Who would buy that much CPUs? Good question. With 2 dual MP motherboards in 1U (too lazy to find a link, I know somebody offers something like that), it would only take about 300 40U racks. Would you bet future national security on it? I don't think I would (and I'm not even american).
What it really shows is that brute-force can succeed, given enough time. But of course the more effective way to attack an encrytion algorithm is on the algorithmic side, because it helps you to find not only one cleartext, but all cleartexts encrypted with that algorithm.
Portion of Internet's data (Score:2)
105GKeys/sec * 8 bytes/key / 2TB/day * 86,400 sec/day * 100% = 35,437.5%
Those numbers don't add up. If, however, I change 2TB/day to 2TB/sec:
105GKeys/sec * 8 bytes/key / 2TB/sec * 100% = 41% of the Internet's traffic.
There's gotta be something a bit off here...My mind just doesn't want to register that almost half of the internet's bandwidth is part of a massive computer cluster.
Re:Heh (Score:2)
That's funny... I'd say that 4 years is far too long for secrets like that.
Well then (Score:2)
Re:Well then (Score:2)
Good job folks (Score:2, Troll)
With apologies to Douglas Adams (Score:4, Funny)
Re:With apologies to Douglas Adams (Score:5, Informative)
Re:With apologies to Douglas Adams (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if you read closely, the plaintext output is:
"The unknown message is: some things are better left unread"
I admit I didn't get it at first, but if just you read closely...
Re:With apologies to Douglas Adams (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sure 42 was tested in one of the 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys tried.
The unknown message is: some things are better left unread
FINALLY. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FINALLY. (Score:2)
And IMHO, alien hunting is a waste of time, since we still don't really have a clue as to how they would communicate. I mean, if they are as advanced as we are, then that means that they would be at least hundreds of lightyears away from us (by consensus opinion) and therefore: their radio sigs would also be hundreds of years old and wouldn;t give us enough insight to them anyway. Besides, how do we know which freqs to check? How do we know that they don't allocate spectrum EXACTLY like we do?
I'm just going to go back to the Mersenne project for now. They have a huge check waiting for the next person to find a Mersenne prime.
Besides that: There's always RC5-72....
Re:FINALLY. (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, switch to seti... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:FINALLY. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, can anyone tell me what the attraction to the d.net project was? It seems like a colossal waste of cycles to me. Everyone knew it was going to be successful, it was just a matter of wasting enough time to eventually find the right block.
Now that it's over, what do we have to show for it? A whole lot of nothing it seems.
Re:FINALLY. (Score:3, Informative)
Brute Force vs design flaw (Score:3, Interesting)
I think those that find actual flaws in the design or math are worthy of admiration. For good reading on the history of such read the code book. It will truly broaden your understanding.
3 legged dog walks into a bar, says" who shot my paw?
Re:Brute Force vs design flaw (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right that the people who find fundamental flaws in cryptography approaches are more informative and helpful in the advancement of the technology, but this wasn't so much about advancing crypto technology. This was about money for the sponsor. This was about seeing just what the idle computing power of thousands computers can do for the geeks. Those seeking to advance anything with their processors are doing folding or setiathome. Not to show disrespect for distributed.net, it's cool in its own ways, but it isn't going to advance cryptography at all, just marketing and 'geek' factor.
Re:Brute Force vs design flaw (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends on what you're encrypting. If you encrypt everything, then being able to crack one message in a couple of years won't help much. If, however, you know which message you want decrypting, then it's just a matter of waiting. Some information isn't time critical.
They Don't Care About Minutes, Though (Score:2)
Re:Brute Force vs design flaw (Score:2)
IRC discussion (Score:4, Informative)
Also, please consider joining us on SlashNET IRC on Saturday 28-Sep-2002 @ 21:00 UTC (5:00PM EDT) for an online Q+A session on the RC5-64 project and the future plans for the distributed.net network.
Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, some on
Re:Congratulations (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, and don't forget genome@home [stanford.edu]. You might consider joining the Wicked Old Atheists [gazonk.org] even :-)
Re:Congratulations (Score:2)
And yes, I run a F@H client on my box damn near 24/7. I like how it's very conservative with it's use of resources when I run other app's. I can play Counter-Strike or UT2K2 and not even have to terminate it.
Re:Congratulations (Score:2)
I went through... (Score:2)
Re:I went through... (Score:3, Funny)
I think many posters here are missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
- They know exactly how insecure RC5-64 is. They want other IT groups, industry groups and tech managers to know it. The easiest way to do that is to offer open challenges with cash prizes. It's never hard for RSA to up their bit-length to 4096, say, a year before 2048 RSA is broken, and someone collects their $200,000. It is hard to make PHBs understand that RC5-64 is not secure if nobody has broken it.
Secondly, Distributed.net clearly isn't doing it for the cash. I didn't do it for the cash, either. (Although I wouldn't have minded winning.) They're doing it because:- Breaking codes gives nerds their kicks.
- Building a distributed computing architecture is a difficult and interesting problem.
With current technology, as RSA likes to demonstrate, the winners are the cryptographers, not the cryptologists (the code breakers.) Quantum computing may change that, and make the cryptologists the winners. Until then, RSA can happily give cash prizes for increasing length keys: the numbers are on their side.How crazy is this? (Score:5, Funny)
If you remove a single element - the $10,000 award offered by RSA - then the press release would read more like,
"A group of degenerate hackers [sic] cracked an encryption method owned by RSA Security Inc. The company has contacted law enforcement authorities, and an attempt to track down these hackers [sic] is currently under way. Under the DMCA, these criminals, when caught, faces sentances of up to..."
Distributed.net no longer in the public eye (Score:5, Insightful)
In one of my CS classes, we were discussing distributed computing, and a question of any well-known distributed computing projects was asked. I answered "Distributed.net" - and the instructor promptly asked "What's that?" The next student to respond, of course, said SETI: the answer he was looking for.
Maybe I'm biased, as the former maintainer of distributed-net for Debian, but has Distributed.net really become this unimportant and forgotten?
Re:Distributed.net no longer in the public eye (Score:2)
Re:Distributed.net no longer in the public eye (Score:2)
And brute forced cracking of an encryption algorithm, which everyone who cares knows is possible anyway, matters?
No thanks... I'd rather have my spare cycles go to something that will help cure cancer, Alzheimer's, or the like. (Yes, I know, d.net has "partnered" with UD on the cancer bit, but it's not a d.net project).
Frankly, I'd give the edge to SETI@home over d.net's projects. But that's just me. I do think that there's alien life out there, but I doubt it's trying to communicate in a fashion that we'll be able to find with SETI@home.
hmm... wonder if I hit the key (Score:2)
32,504 800 MHz G4 vs. 45,998 2 GHz Athlon XP? (Score:2, Interesting)
800 MHz G4 is faster crunching the keys than a 2 GHz Athlon XP
I am reading that right?
an interesting bit of trivia (Score:5, Interesting)
In the interests of speed, only the first "block" of the crypted text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it's possible for a key which isn't the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn't decrypt the text it does yield a plaintext which matches "The unkn" for the first eight bytes.
There's been much speculation and napkin scribbling on just how frequently such false positives might present themselves. The general consensus seemed to be that such an occurrence is extremely improbable but in a dataset the size of 2**64, extremely improbable may still yield a nonzero frequency.
The key 0xBB27D52F60FD932C does, indeed, decrypt to a plaintext for which the first eight bytes match the known plaintext for the contest. The remainder of the decrypted text, however, is just garbage. This key has actually been returned by clients twice over the course of the contest.
In August 1999, "Edward Scissorhands" [distributed.net] turned in the key.
Again in July 2000, Team RC5 Chile [distributed.net] submitted it. Since they're unfortunately using a shared email address for their team, there's no way to know which individual was the submitter.
I wasn't the winning key, but was a really unique "near miss". It also represents an interesting datapoint regarding the RC5 algorighim. A brute-force search is really the only way to conclusively determine the liklihood of such false positives.
Re:an interesting bit of trivia (Score:5, Interesting)
November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the
circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
What have we discovered in this exercise? (Score:2, Insightful)
In the process, we have learned absolutely nothing. It's like a game where I say "I'm thinking of a place, can you guess where it is?" Then hundreds of thousands of you would send in guesses, and eventually you would get it. What a pointless exercise that would be! I'm sorry, but I don't see the difference here. In a way this is even less interesting, because you know that sometime the code will crack. There is no element of surprise at all in the results, and once we have it, we learn... nothing at all.
In the process, how much electricity do we waste chugging through the code? Did one of you clever people calculate how many fewer tons of CO2, soot and radioactive waste would have been produced if you had just left your Athlons turned off? How about all the air conditioners you used to cool the rooms the Athlons live in?
For the next challenge, I suggest that you just pretend your CPU is working, and in a few months (time determined randomly according to the probability of cracking if your computers had been on), the guy who issued the challenge will pretend that his code was cracked and announce what his oh-so-important secret message was. That would sure make me happier--and it's not like we'd lear any less that way.
(Notice also that my criticism doesn't apply to SETI or protein folding projects. At least they give us a chance of finding out something.)
We were more lucky this time. (Score:2)
For the last project, CSC, we had to exhaust the entire keyspace and then go back and recheck some of the work.
Congrats to everyone who participated.
And just for kicks, here are my final stats on the project:
Rank: 38501 (out of 331,286)
First block: 25-Sep-1999
Last Block: 22-Sep-2002
Days working: 1,094 (out of 1,796)
Total Blocks: 226,544 (out of 61,015,324,138!)
The odds were 1 in 3,802,292 that I would have found the lucky key before anyone else.
End of an era (for me, anyway) (Score:4, Interesting)
I watched the progression of the computer industry grow just by watching the gradual increase of my daily keyrate.
Four years ago when I first started, I was going through 52 blocks a day. Yesterday, I went through 2784 blocks. Looking at the daily graph is practically a history of my life for four years. I can see spikes where my company bought a dozen computers and I borrowed their cycles for a couple of days while I configured them. I can see dips where I turned my computers off to go on vacation for a weekend. There's the whole flat area from last year when I didn't have a job and so had limited access to extra CPU cycles.
Sponsored by your local electric company... (Score:3, Insightful)
300 Watts * 1 million hours = 300,000 kilowatt hours. 300,000 kilowatt hours * $0.10 = $30,000.
I wonder how many U.S. and Iraqi soldiers died to make this great display of wasted energy possible.
Re:Sponsored by your local electric company... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sponsored by your local electric company... (Score:3, Informative)
You've forwarded the proposition that
U.S. and Iraqi soldiers had to die to run the decryption.
Which yields the converse:
If wasn't run, no U.S. and Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.
Which is patently untrue. You're attempt at an emotional appeal as an argument was not only weak, it was stupid. You might as well have said that not turning off your lights when you're not using them causes soldiers to die.
Obviously time for 65-bit now (Score:2)
False positives in RC5-64 (Score:5, Interesting)
In the interests of speed, only the first "block" of the crypted RC5-64 text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it's possible for a key which isn't the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn't decrypt the text it does yield a plaintext which matches "The unkn" for the first eight bytes.
The key 0xBB27D52F60FD932C does, indeed, decrypt to a plaintext for which the first eight bytes match the known plaintext for the contest. This key has actually been submitted three times over the course of the contest, once by three different users.
In August 1999, again in July 2000. Most recently, the bymer@ukrpost.net worm found the false-positive on November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the
owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
Fortunately, we eventually found the actual key. But because we were seeing these legitimate false-positives being reported throughout the duration of the contest, we had full confidence that our network and our clients were functioning properly and that we would eventually find the actual solution in time.
Re:False positives in RC5-64 - SO IS NEXT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Surprised they're going on. (Score:2)
Given the payout for this stuff, I'd have expect some expert cryptographers are working on the 128 bit algorithm, looking for cracks to reduce the brute force time...that's what I would be doing at this point had I the skill...not focusing on the crummy brute force attacks....
Lets see $10,000/1million= :( (Score:4, Funny)
In further news all participating Distributed.net users will be issued a check for 1 Cent.
Something worth while (Score:2)
How about Cancer research? It's already been proven beneficial.
http://members.ud.com/about/getting_started/
UD!! Sign up today and get cracking!
(unfortunately they only have win32/intel clients, doh!)
~LoudMusic
Isn't this contest illegal under the DMCA? (Score:2)
No. (Score:2, Informative)
True, the company sponsored the contest, and asked that you try to break it, but technically speaking, couldn't they be prosecuted for it?
The DMCA's circumvention ban applies only to access control mechanisms on copyrighted works, when such mechanisms are broken without authorization. The RC5-64 encryption is not an access control mechanism on a copyrighted work.
Interesting system comparisons .. (Score:2)
Clients turn off? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyhow, my client just starts, tries to connect to the server and gets and error message like the following...
[Sep 26 17:32:37 UTC] NetUpdate::Connect handshake failed. (0.168)
So atleast it's not going to sit there and make up random keys anymore. It may have been a slight security risk (possibly) but maybe dnet should've sent a special request that would show a little message when you click on the cow (or make the cow change color so you would click on it.. ie Chocolate cow) so you'd know to uninstall it if you wern't paying attention to the news.
Oh well, I've been doing rc5 since my junior year of high school and have a lot of memories of installign in, uninstalling it, taking over a friends install, and him taking over mine. It was a lot of good times for this little silly program... installing it on all the computers in high school was a blast. It was truly a great forum to bring a lot of geeks together. The Slashdot team, 2600, FreeBSD and Linux Groups... all competing in a silly encryption game. :)
Decrypt the solutions yourself (Score:2)
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/ [distributed.net]
LOST: RC5 block crunching machine (Score:3, Funny)
I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS!
Is there any way to find out where the rogue machine is? heh..
It's submitting about 200 blocks a day. I just wish that I could FIND it...
Re:Yea!!! (Score:3)
There is a difference between saying "in theory, we could do this and that" and actually doing it.
Cryptography specifically is a realm of arbitrary large numbers, theoretical math way, way beyond what 99% of people ever learn in both school and university, and lots of guesswork, estimates, approximations, you name it.
I don't think anyone is really surprised by the outcome, but nevertheless, the only real proof that something can be done is and always will be to actually do it.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
I'm with the OP on this. Once in a time there was a purpose with cracking DES; proving it wasn't as hard (secure) the government wanted people to believe. However, that was a long time ago now.
C'mon, estimating the time of a brute-force attack is almost trivial. Once you can time how long it takes to attack some percentage of the keyspace, interpolation to mid- and worst-case is simple.
There's a lot of other distributed problems to spend time on, problems where the solution actually is worth something.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
I remember when this first started out they believed it would take about 1000 years to crack.
There's a lot of interesting information that comes from this aside from the actual problem being attacked.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably because the scalability of a distributed computing system was underestimated. Know this, it took a boatload of CPU time to crack this thing---just as predicted. What was not properly estimated was how much parallelism would be achieved.
There's a lot of interesting information that comes from this aside from the actual problem being attacked.
From a cryptography science, none at all. This project added absolutely nothing to our knowledge of cryptography.
All of the interesting information learned was in the area of designing, organizing, and managing a distributed computing network, and the potential CPU power such as system could harness. That exact same knowledge could be gained attacking an exhaustive-search problem with some genuinely useful outcome, like protein folding perhaps.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
Based on the numbers from distributed.net [distributed.net]. The actual computing power used is equivalent to 32504 800Mhz Apple powerbook G4s running for 676 days. With the same number of powerbooks you could exhaust the keyspace in 790 days. For 100 million dollars USD you could buy 100000 Dell Athlon XPs from BestCry and exhaust the keyspace in a little over a year.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what has to be considered in all of this.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
All bets are off though once we get quantum machines up and running...provided we can get around the whole heisenberg principle.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
Are you certain?
<rimshot/>
Re:Yea!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardly. We're talking about a third of a million participants taking 4 years here. Unless someone's developed a time machine and built ASCI from some future technology it's not that fast! (remember, many participants were science labs or other groups utilising several, sometimes hundreds of machines).
Now we should see project OGR really kick into gear!
Re:Yea!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to sound too black-helicopterish or anything, but these are only the supercomputers that we know about.
Isn't it entirely possible that in the interests of tracking "terrorists", the Department of Homeland Security might just have assembled something that makes E.S. look like an old laptop?
The technology exists, it's just a simple matter of somebody (read: corporation / government) with the funding and wherewithall to put it together and make it function.
Re:Yea!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
According to D.Net's press release, the peak rate achieved by D.Net on this effort was equivalent to ~46,000 2GHZ Athlon XP's working in tandem. Can even ASCI White or Japan's supercomputer match this sort of processing power?
I'll admit that the RC5-64 project had very little practical use, but it was a heck of a proof-of-concept in terms of people's willingness to donate vast amounts of CPU time and the staggering amount of otherwise-wasted computing power that's out there and waiting to be utilized.
I'd stuck with D.Net over the years even as more useful distributed applications cropped up, out of some sort of loyalty since I'd already invested so much (CPU) time in it. Now, I think I'll pick a more "useful" application like protein folding or something to occupy my spare cycles...
Hope you don't live in the US (Score:2)
Re:Yea!!! (Score:2)
So somehow has proven that given enough time, money and effort, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of... BRUTE FORCE.
Nope, we didn't even do that. We proved that given enough time, money, effort, and the first few characters of the decrypted message, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of BRUTE FORCE.
Want something more interesting? Compress the message with a really good english language compression algorithm first, then encrypt it.
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Help out cancer research right now with these projects:
Folding@Home [stanford.edu] and United Devices [purdue.edu].
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
Besides, who cares? The point behind all of these distributed applications is to do the work, not to award some prize. If all you're after is money then have your computer generate random lottery numbers all day - you're as likely to win that money as you are any prize from a distributed project.
I have my home and work PCs running the UD agent not because of some esoteric points I'm earning, but because I would like to help find a cure to cancer (and yes, I donate to the American Cancer Society too). My father died of cancer, my mother had breast cancer, and one of my coworkers has a 11 year old son with leukemia. That's reason enough for me.
Help out their customers ! (Score:5, Informative)
while seti is truly for the benefit of mankind, who is gonna really benefit from a cure to cancer, you think that cure is going to be dispensed for free ? even if the rest of the world solves the problem for them ?
while they do say they will not sell the results to drug companies , how are they going to distribute and manufacture these drugs, who will be in charge of pricing, how do you price a drug that is the cure for one of the most horrible diseases on the planet ?
the trouble i have with United devices is they call their relationships with these research groups "customers"
taken from their license agreement
Intellectual Property Rights. Member acknowledges and agrees that both the Licensed Program and any data distributed to Member's computer for processing constitute confidential and proprietary information belonging to UD and/or its customers and partners ("Customer/Partner Data"), and contain trade secrets and intellectual property protected under United States copyright and other laws, international treaty provisions and laws of other jurisdictions. Member agrees not to remove, obscure, or alter any notice of patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret or other proprietary right in the Licensed Program or Customer/Partner Data. This Agreement does not grant Member any rights in connection with any trademarks or service marks of UD or its customers and partners.
so AFAICS the data is a trade secret and of course you sign away all rights if a cure is discovered to them , remember finding the cure to cancer is akin to having a license to print money.
also
Incorporated Software. The Licensed Program may contain software from one or more third parties. Use of such third party software is subject to the terms and conditions of applicable third party license agreements, if any
meaning spyware ? who exactly am i donating my cycles to ?
maybe iam cynical i just think this project is not going to help many people except the drugs companies and those people who can afford the drugs, and you will buy them or you will die , pretty good sales incentive egh?
Remember the fight Africa had to get Aids drugs for cheap ?, and remember that wasnt even a cure all that drug did was treat the symptoms, so imagine how hard the people that need it most are going to fight when an actual cure is found.
ironically when a few people get anthrax attacks in the western world there is suddenly a drug available for free in massive quantities.
Sorry, while i agree that finding a cure for cancer is a good thing(TM) , this company (as in profit driven) just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, at least with the seti project no big corp is going to benefit financially from disovering there is other intelligent life out there and then hold the rest of the world to ransom with a chequebook as a release term.
Re:hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
>and bring them to your neighborhood recycling
>center for proper disposal. Exactly how many
>needless megawatt-hours of electricity did these
>things burn up already?
How many megawatt-hours have been burned by the routers propagating your post, and the computers and monitors of the people reading it?
Oh the humanity!
Re:Are they going to share the prize? (Score:5, Informative)
RSA Labs is offering a US$10,000 prize to the group that wins this contest. The distribution of the cash will be as follows:
$1000 to the winner
$1000 to the winner's team - this would go to the winner if he wasn't affiliated with a team
$6000 to a non-profit organization, decided by vote
$2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code
The vote will be decided on through an extension of the statistics engine, with one vote per block per person.
And to think.. it took a few seconds to find that, and a couple minutes to type your post..
Not really. (Score:2)
I'm too tired to explain why, I'm sure someone else will pick up the buck on this one.
What? (Score:2)
There's actually a copy of the book sitting on the shelf here. Can you refer me to a page number where this bullcrap takes place, so I can debunk it?
More worthwhile? (Score:2)
Yeah, sure, that's a much more "worthwhile" pursuit.
Re:More worthwhile? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bottom line -- the whole RC5-64 project was a big freaking no-op. Therefore, yes, I do feel looking for signs of extraterrestrial life, or gene sequencing, or some other task would have been more fruitful than the goal of this pursuit. I realized that years ago and switched to SETI as a direct result of that observation. And the point about whether ET wants to contact us or not is irrelevant. If the SETI project was able to attain their goal, it would literally be the greatest event in history. Because of the ramifcations of this possibility, the end goal is more worthy and will reveal something about the nature of things, rather than prove a hypothesis we already know to be true and provable. The amount of CPU cycles wasted on this project that could have been applied elsewhere is staggering.
Re:why not (Score:2)
http://members.ud.com/download/gold/
i would be happy to turn our computers loose on a problem which will result in something everyone can benifit from, but i'm not willing to install vmware to run it.
Re:why not (Score:2)
Not sure exactly what that entails but it seems like the results will be freely available if you fall into one of those camps.
Re:i cant even pronounce this number (Score:2, Informative)
In american english of course. I recall something about the british having "Millard" between million and thousand.
Re:i cant even pronounce this number (Score:2)
But there is a differing on the use of trillion
Trillion:
1. The cardinal number equal to 10^12.
2. Chiefly British. The cardinal number equal to 10^18.
Re:D-net's site..... (Score:2)