Hi
Someone asked about the SSL challenge. Well if you're interested here is a personal view from a "client" participant.
Despite criticisms posted to this list I think it worked pretty well for a first attempt, mainly due to Piete for hacking out new code and fixing things pretty quickly when things went wrong.
There was very little time to test software initially and get problems ironed out. I couldn't get brutessl to compile without tinkering and had timeout problems with brclient due to the sometimes slow link from Austalia. Later versions of client software (that I didn't get till half way through the challenge) seemed to run without any problems and without losing ACKs. But my old client had failed to ACK quite a few of its earlier keyspaces and due to lack of a logfile I ended up writing a script to redo them and ACK them with the new version of the client software.
One problem with being in Australia was that I was asleep when new software updates were announced and tended to get them later than everyone else, and because of this an auto-update would be particularly useful to me if we do this again.
In the end it needed a bit of user intervention to get all my keyspaces ACKed but the problems were sorted out by the time the challenge was half way through and I think the next time we try this (and I hope we will) it will run much more smoothly. It was a good "learning" experience for all of us (especially Piete!) and should be regarded as what it was: an experiment that didn't run completely smoothly but was ultimately successful.
Taking part in the challenge was fun and I hope we can do another challenge sometime soon.
One gripe though - my ACKs don't appear on the credits list ;-(
Sherry