I have a very special announcement, something we've been working on for days now, and I am very pleased to be able to make this public here for you today.

We have started a distributed.net team! It's an amazing breakthrough, one that will revolutionize and galvanize the GeekCulture Community, and I know you're going to love it.

Snaggy has formed a Geekculture Team to crack the RC5 code!

Since you're all geeks, I'm thinking that a couple of links will get you where you need to be, to follow Snaggy to glory.

I might also add that the winning team (read: geekculture.com) receives $1000 USD and the winning person on that team also receives $1000 USD. The object is to have your computer, in its spare idle CPU cycles, crack a 64 bit encrypted code.... but you already knew that.

distributed.net:
http://www.distributed.net

geekculture team stats:
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/tmsummary.php3?team=925184131

snaggy's personal stats:
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/psummary.php3?id=378792

What you do to get involved:

1) Download the software
http://www.distributed.net/download/clients.html

2) Install and run the software.
It will ask for your email address and you will use this later to check your stats. MAKE SURE YOU ONLY SIGN UP FOR RC5. The software runs 4 different cracking programs, but you want all your efforts for RC5.

3) After running the software for about a day (it will automatically download uncracked packets of data and upload processed packets)... you will be a registered member of the distributed.net family.
Check for yourself, using your email address, here:
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/
(enter your email address for participant and then search).

4) Go to the bottom of your stats (which should look like Snaggy's) and press the button to "Send me my password". You will then receive your password via email and can modify your online name and other cute stuff.

5) Go to the Geekculture Team stats page, scroll down, click on "I want to join this team" and then enter your user id (your email address) and your password (the one you got in email from step 4).
About a day later (there are daily database updates) you will show up as being a member of the team... and your processed packets will display and be attributed to the team.

6) When/if you crack the code, you'll receive an email and then you get $1000 and geekculture.com gets $1000.

You'll run this in your spare CPU cycles (it steps out of the way for anything else you run) and you may win money for yourself and geekculture... and most of all it will be fun to compare how much data you can process per day versus others... and how our team does versus other teams!

Oh, there's just one more thing....

The $1000 share that Geekculture.com gets.... it will be distributed among the rest of the team members!

Update: OK, here are the official rules for being part of the Team split: Your last submission must have been made within 18 days of the win, and you have to have submitted blocks at least 25% of the days from joining until the team wins. How does that sound?

I'd issue Geek Culture a friendly challenge to try to catch my team, The Dogcows, but even though there are only 2 of us, we have a rather large head start. Right now we're 4,820,000 blocks ahead of the Geek Culture team and it's likely the contest will end before you can make up that kind of difference. Still, a little incentive never hurt any effort. Catch me if you can.

A central server has a bunch of 64bit encrypted keys. 1 key is randomly chosen as THE key to crack.

You download decryption software. The software grabs handfuls of the keys from the server, decrypts them and sends the results back up to the server.

The server keeps stats like how many keys you process per second, day, etc... and your team totals as well.

Anyone know if there's a perfomance hit for running the classic verion under OS X?

bd

after all, doesn't hurt me and I can get cash, right?

"The odds are 1 in 369 that we will wrap this thing
up in the next 24 hours. (This also means that we'll
exhaust the keyspace in 369 days at yesterday's rate.) "

Snaggy, my G4s are at your command. I should be getting another one next month, hopefully.

Interestingly enough, top says that dnetc is currently using 190% of my cpu space. heh.

------------------
The Matrix Cereal: There Is No Spoon

Never mind. I fixed it. I had installed the OGR also, by mistake. After disabling it, the cursor stopped flashing. I was getting ready to use ResEdit to turn the cursor into a beating heart for Valentine's Day.

Example:
Lets say dnetc is in /Applications/dnetc
Create a file there called startrc5.sh with these contents:
#!/bin/sh
if [ `ps -ax|grep dnetc|grep -v grep|wc -l` -lt 1 ]; then
./dnetc -hide -l logfile
fi

make startrc5.sh executable (chmod 755 startrc5.sh)

And then crontab -e
and add:

3,33 * * * * cd /Applications/dnetc; ./startrc5.sh

http://homepage.mac.com/lex42/osxdnet.sit

The Team Goods!

Respond there if you're interested. Someone will get a free t-shirt!

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LostInColorado

It was:

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/236.html

GeekCulture Team is ranked #386 for yesterday!
The odds are 1 in 3,819 that this team will find the key before anyone else does.

and/or put it in a cronjob

Now let's see what a lil' ol' 400MHZ G3 will do amongst all these G4's. What's the old saying? "Slow and steady wins the race."

quote:

---

Originally posted by Rednivek:
dnetc -hide

and/or put it in a cronjob

Of course, [we] do not advocate using computers which are not yours to install this on... but your frat brother's computers are a great idea (if they agree)....

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by feldspar:
Many thanx to Lex for his little installer. Worked like a charm, my man!

Now let's see what a lil' ol' 400MHZ G3 will do amongst all these G4's. What's the old saying? "Slow and steady wins the race."

---

Should do around 1MKey/sec. Every little bit helps!

Speaking of G4s, I just put in my order for a spiffy new iMac. Just can't settle for #2

EDIT: The 1.2Ghz system is currently down and I haven't gotten around to adding the G3.

Power PC 750 G3 @400 MHz -> 1.3 Mkey/s
Power PC 7400 G4 @400 MHz -> 3.5 Mkey/s
AMD K6 @400 MHz -> 0.72 Mkey/s
AMD K7 Athlon @500 MHz -> 1.5 Mkey/s (note, this is 500 MHz not 400 MHz, because Athlons don't exist in 400 MHz flavors)
Intel Celeron @400 MHz -> 1.1 Mkey/s
Intel Pentium III @400 MHz -> 1.1 Mkey/s

I didn't realize the G4 was that much better than even the G3.

Note for those who are new to this: RC5 performance of a given chip is NOT a real-world benchmark. RC5 is a degenerate case that only uses addition and bit rotation. Chips that have bit rotation in hardware (Pentium, PowerPC) do much better in RC5 than chips that do not (Alpha, AMD K6). The bit rotation instructions are not commonly used; it is only a fluke that RC5 happens to use these instructions.

hey Lex, cool!

I wonder if someone more talented than me can make up an OS X ap so the Terminally Afraid can just double-click on a big icon and start crunching? or is there some technical limitation to doing this?

quote:

---

Originally posted by Snaggy:

hey Lex, cool!

I wonder if someone more talented than me can make up an OS X ap so the Terminally Afraid can just double-click on a big icon and start crunching? or is there some technical limitation to doing this?

---

Not I, at least not at the moment. I've got a copy of "Learning Cocoa" handy, but right now I've got Java and Sociology books to get through, not to mention recreational fiction and calculus homework. And some other programs I've been meaning to write. I'll probably get to it eventually but for now all you'll get from me is a bit of sloppy Perl. Sorry for the inconvenience...

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Stay alert!
Trust no one!
Keep your laser handy!

Ok, so I wrote a GUI installer. RealBasic: For those "I don't want to learn Objective-C or the windowing api for other languages" days.

Anyhow, it is now a part of my little installer package (see above). This version doesn't need to go anywhere secure, so it doesn't ask for your password.