On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 05:06 PM, Faustine wrote: Tim wrote:

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Except when was the last time you heard of a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher being broken with _any_ amount of computer crunching? Since when did people stop trying? The last time I heard a researcher talk about trying to break a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher was last Thursday. Hearsay and hot air? Probably; nothing that merits repeating. But it's hardly a dead issue. And why not name who this researcher was, and why you think the cipher he was trying to break was Cypherpunks-interesting?

Because it's impolite to attribute other people's ideas and commentary to them in a public forum if they assumed they were speaking to you informally, in confidence. Hearsay and hot air. I'm assuming you find Rijndael interesting. http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/ (snip)

We've all heard that line before, but I still don't think it's too far- fetched to assume that anyone who does work in this area might appreciate 50 megs of free software to create his own supercomputer.

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Fatuous nonsense, Beowulf clusters have been out for several years. The hard part is getting 50 Pentiums, not the software.

The idea has been around, but not the free software from Sandia.

As for "50 gigaflops," big whoop. A readily-available dual G4 machine is rated at about 8-10 gigaflops. (Or "FLOPS," as you wish.)

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Still not interesting for cracking ciphers, in the real world.

Never said it was. 50? try 512.

You never know what might come from putting that kind of computational power in the hands of people here. Create, break, do whatever you want.

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You need to get up to speed, so to speak.

232.6 billion operations a second still looks fairly impressive to me. ~Faustine.