At 12:12 PM 8/23/97 -0400, nospam-seesignature@ceddec.com wrote:
DEScrack was only done on a relatively few computers. If a really big prize was offered (In this lotto, you just run this screen saver which uses less bandwidth than pointcast... The chinese radio lottery via the internet), you could get almost every computer into the act.
This is a good point. It took $10,000 (plus some hope for fame) to motivate thousands of computer users to participate in DESCHALL. But $10k is not all that much money. Few people will go to extraordinary measures to get a long shot chance at winning this relatively small sum. Note that there were few DESCHALL participants from China, India, and other countries where there is a substantial numbers of computers. Now imagine if the prize was $1,000,000 or $10M. That's real money to just about every student out there. Every box at every university would be working on it. Employees would install the cracker first and ask their sysadmin later. If at all. I you offer such sums, people would find cycles you didn't even know existed. BTW, I am thinking about organizing corporate sponsorships to beef up the reward for the RC5-64 crack. I am quite certain that at a $1M prize offering, I would be cracked faster than DES. --Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred. DES is dead! Please join in breaking RC5-56. http://rc5.distributed.net/