| From: | Wordman <wordman@*******.COM> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | [OT] Project Bovine team? |
| Date: | Mon, 16 Nov 1998 21:04:37 -0500 |
the list. I will summarize, if need be.
I'm looking to start a team for Project Bovine, and I thought a good way to
do it would be to fill the team with Shadowrun players (or maybe all RPG
enthusiasts).
Project Bovine, briefly, is an effort by distributed.net to crack a message
encrypted with the RC5 algorithm using a 64-bit key. The effort is a
response to a challenge from the inventors of RC5 (RSA Systems) to award
US$10,000 to the first group that could decode the message. Project Bovine
is a brute force attack (trying all possible key combinations to decode the
message), using software that runs while your computer is idle. The idea is
to get thousands of personal computers to crack keys during periods that
those computers would otherwise be doing nothing.
Bovine clients are available for about every platform and OS out there. The
way it works is that your client gets a list of keys to crack from a central
server. It cracks them and reports to the central server, tracking your
progress by using your e-mail address. Groups of people can get together to
form teams, pooling there keys.
Project Bovine has been going on for a year or so. Previous to that, Bovine
took the prize for cracking the 56-bit version of RC5 in 250 days.
The reward for finding the key would be $10,000 paid to distributed.net.
They will split the award as follows:
$1000 to the winner
$1000 to the winner's team
$6000 to a non-profit organization, decided by vote*
$2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code
*each key cracked is one vote
You can find a more thorough description at http://www.distributed.net/rc5/.
I would like to set up a team. I would like to know the following:
1) Does this sound interesting to people?
2) Should the team be a "Shadowrun" team, or an "RPG" team?
If someone on our team were to win, I suggest the $1000 slated to go to the
team also go to the person who found the magic key, rather than try to
figure out some equitable way of splitting it amongst the team.
Sorry of for the interruption.
Wordman
