Re: Cracking DES or building a DES cracking machine?

If we are talking about convincing 100,000 people to donate a lot of their CPU time, would not it be possible to convince the same 100,000 people to donate $10 each and build a $1,000,000 DES cracking machine?

Or enough magnetic tape or CD-R to pre-compute a lookup table, accessible via the Internet? Hmm, taking one byte and running it through 2^40 keys will produce exactly 1024GB values. Mag tape is dollars / megabyte: it seems possible to take a known clear text (like "cypherpunks") and compute a lookup table that would take a look at the encryption and list the key(s) that match. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps