Make your mark in the history of mathematics. Use the spare cycles of your PC/PPC/UNIX box to help find a new prime. http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
This .sig and the DES challenge gave me an idea that I'd like to bounce off the list. One of the things about these screensaver style cracking/searching programs is the hassle in downloading/installing the programs. There's also the problem of maybe downloading some trojan. And they need to be changed any time there's a new problem or key to work on (or a bug). The whole thing is so cumbersome that it's easy to claim it's not really a practical attack, or that it costs too much. However, what if there was a safe scripting language with bignum arithmetic and other cryptographic primitives, and what if lots of people ran a service that would accept scripts in that language and respond with the answer? Say, a Safe-TCL interface to Peter Gutmann's cryptlib, running at idle priority? Sort of like a distributed batch queue, and also a bit like the way jobs are (were?) submitted to Crays. The Cypherpunks Super Computer. It need not be significantly slower than raw code if the primitives are high level enough. I think this would be technically quite interesting, and would maybe play well in the media too. In response to the "it would cost too much to be _really_ practical" claim, anyone could always note that there was this distributed cypherpunks supercomputer that anonymous people could use to break keys with for free. I'd be happy to code something like this up if there's interest. Comments? Cheers, Frank O'Dwyer.