If anyone is putting together a wish list of features for the next iteration of the distributed brute would they like to consider some sort of mirroring approach for the server (at least on stats or updates/ software ) so that some of that traffic could be reduced? I'm afraid I am one of the guilty trying to log on to check on the stats at least once and I probably contributed to choking it just by doing that. If a local server could have been updated, it would save bandwidth on the server doing real work. Could a trusted group of segemnt dolers be put together? I like the idea of running a benchmark type of program so that I could multiply keys/sec times the amount of time I had to donate, and only get a reasonable for me number of segments. I would hope that statistics be gathered on the number of keys tested, elapsed time, etc. so that we all got some more or less real world insight into key lengths and strengths, effort required to break, that we have all heard so many projections about... especially as the doling gets more sophisticated and the number of participants/cycle pool increases. Will there be Hal3? Just to ask a really dumb question, how do you know when you get the key? Is there some plaintext header string you're looking for? --pjp