On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Tim May wrote:
On Monday, September 3, 2001, at 05:55 PM, V. Alex Brennen wrote:
I've started on the very beginnings of a GNU Distributed Computing client to attack the RSA RC5 and factoring challenges.
Jeez, why waste time on such an old-hat idea?
I'm serious. The latest factoring and RC5 challenges do nothing new.
The goal is to develop an architecture to allow access to collective processing power. Hopefully, much like this mailing list, it will drive the establishment of a sense of community and serve to reinforce a developing culture. The reinforcement of the idea of community computing, networking, and information, resources can help drive a desire for a greater realization of those things and the development of supporting group of people for extensions of those ideas. For example, ideas like FreeNet, which are derived from the cryptoanarchist school of thought. So, the answer to your question is that it's interesting to me and I'm the one doing the programming. If you can come up with something more interesting I'll probably be happy to work on it. But I'm not really interested in padding the pockets of the Lime Group, LCC. and I'm buzz worded out on P2P. What I like is the idea of trying to revitalize the cypherpunk movement - even a very tiny little bit. I'm really very disappointed with the Individual Sovereignty/Cryptoanarchy subculture lately. It seems to be running out of steam. There seems to be very few people working on interesting things. Coderpunks is a ghost town with occasional spam rolling through like a tumble weed, and cypherpunks seems to be obsessed with Jim Bell like a bunch of little girls over the back street boys. Is anyone else writing code? - VAB