A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security wrote: | The second point is that their scalability seems to be based on costs per | chip alone, cost for which the engineering cost has been recovered and for | which the yeild is significant, hardly givens when you are talking pushing | the state of the art, given this 200 Mhz Pentiums would be U$10.00 also | (well, maybe U$25.00). Government agencies don't need to recover costs, they stick it to the taxpayer. Why was Clipper so cheap before it bombed? | Finally, no cost is allocated to the sustem required to program/evaluate | the ponderings of these 100's of ASICs. As anyone who has ever programmed | a massively parallel computer (which is what they are talking about in their | brute force machine, it is the boundary communications that kill you. | | True, each machine could operate on a specific portion of the keyspace with | bits fixed as a function of its address, but each will need to be loaded | with the plaintext to match and have some means to communicate success. | You just need to flag riase, not do real communication. You could use a tree structure to pass data back. No need for 11 dimensional hypercube interconnects. (Side note: Thinking Machines is out of Chapter 11.) Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume