Sameer Parekh <sameer@c2.net> writes:

ET <emergent@eval-apply.com> writes:

...

I can't remember it word for word, but it went like this: "If you're going to decrypt financial transactions you'd better be prepared to get 1000 computers and spend 3 months on the project."

Not at all surprising, considering the wording of Rocke's press release.

I agree. He didn't even mention the possibility of hardware cracks, nor estimates of times to break DES with hardware. 10,000 people burn more CPU than ever managed by a distributed effort in history, and the PR is poorly managed. You need to invest some of that effort in PR. Why no mention of the fact that the crack cost $10,000 (the prize money). And what happened to the prize money? (Who won it? Did the guy finding the key? Or did something boring like giving it to GNU or EFF happen to it?) Why no source code? Some general comments about the crack: Many of the people involved in running the cracks seemed more concerned with their own glory, or with getting their name in lights to enhance their consulting rates, or the technical interest of it, or control freakish tendencies over the management of it, arguing over how best to design the software to conceal the key from the finder of the key! etc, than in making a political statement about the weakness of DES. Seemed like few of them were cypherpunks at heart. This reflected itself I think in the complete hostility to giving the prize money to the winner, the fact that several of the cracks wouldn't reveal the source code, nor their techniques. The earlier cracks the cypherpunks as a group were involved in (netscape breaks) were much more open (source code was released, and benefited from release by others contributing speed-ups). There was none of this attitude which I detected amongst some of the DES groups of excluding others from a small groups organisational effort, because that group wanted the lime-light. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`