Adam Back wrote:
Some general comments about the crack:
Many of the people involved in running the cracks seemed more concerned with their own glory, or with getting their name in lights to enhance their consulting rates, or the technical interest of it, or control freakish tendencies over the management of it, arguing over how best to design the software to conceal the key from the finder of the key! etc, than in making a political statement about the weakness of DES.
There seemed to be a multitude of political interests working to different ends in a number of the crack efforts, according to a lady who was involved with a couple of them rather intimately. Her impression was that there were people involved who were purposely giving out patently bad advice and working toward removing some of the more competent players from the scene.
Seemed like few of them were cypherpunks at heart.
This reflected itself I think in the complete hostility to giving the prize money to the winner, the fact that several of the cracks wouldn't reveal the source code, nor their techniques.
I know more than a few people who began to join in one or another of the cracks and then said to hell with it because of the cliquish nature of the efforts. Peter Trei's software ran best on my machines but when I contacted a couple of the groups as to how to find what keys had already been searched I was pretty much told to fuck off like it was some great secret only for the in-crowd. Also, there was a fair amount of sabotage going on in the background. The New Media effort in particular was plagued by bogus versions of their software being distributed and efforts to interfere with various sites running their software. Even their own version of the software was bogus at the point I first downloaded it. When I emailed them to point it out, they denied it, but then they stopped giving out their software for a couple weeks while they rewrote it, and then refused to make their source code available after that. All in all, my impression was there was too much ego and intrigue going on to make the distributed cracking efforts terribly efficient and functional at many points along the way. I would give those running the distributed cracks a few points for effort, but not many points for integrity. I still have a lingering feeling that the whole affair is being choreographed according to some unknown script, but I'm suspicious by nature. TruthCracker