Lucky Green wrote:

At 06:15 PM 6/23/97 -0700, Mike Duvos wrote:

...

Really. It appears that the DESCHALL frivolities actually enhanced the reputation of DES, fluffy press releases by C2 and Security Dynamics notwithstanding.

Which is why I opposed a distributed crack ever since the crack was first proposed. But once the crack got underway, the only thing to do was to participate and hope it wouldn't take all that long. Stressing the individual that found the key over the group effort was the best thing that could be done in an already bad situation. Spin control is a fact of life.

IMHO, it would have been better to emphasize the group effort, and that they could continue to crack keys at a rate of one every 30 days even if the computing base didn't continue to grow. Not to mention that they could also be cracking 40-bit keys at a rate of about 2000 a day. -- What is appropriate for the master is not appropriate| Tom Weinstein for the novice. You must understand Tao before | tomw@netscape.com transcending structure. -- The Tao of Programming |