Will French writes

Scott Brickner writes:

...

Then what do you care about the group's procedures? It doesn't "prevent you from participating" --- you *aren't* participating. You're attempting to solve the problem on your own.

This distinction is valid in the current series of academic exercises. However, if we were actually trying to break something important, anything that might accelerate the crack would be a form of participation. And as Nathan Loofbourrow has pointed out, the random method is much more secure against real-world retaliation. It's also the only method that will work for me; I use a shell account, and I never know in advance when I will get time on the computers at work (which aren't on the net at all).

We've identified several forms of "real-world retaliation:" 1) "Result hoarding" - failure to report a found key 2) "Segment hoarding" - requesting more segments than one can hope to search 3) Denial of service - preventing access to the server The "random search" method eliminates all three of these at about 37% higher cost in search time, on the average. I submit that if we *really* were trying to break something important, we could design a system which eliminated the first two and adequately limited the third, but at *much* less cost. The problems in the current system were to be expected of a first attempt. In the future: Only the server assigns segments, only the assignee may report the status of a segment, and after all segments are NAKed we know condition 1 has occurred, at which time we start over, but never assign the same segment to the same searcher. Limit the number of segments which may be outstanding with one searcher at one time as a function of work rate. Deploy redundant servers. As to whether the distinction is valid, I'd still say the only difference between working on your own and working "with" the group, but using an uncoordinated, random search method is one of intent --- that is, it's all in your mind.

I _don't_ care about the procedures, as long as I can get the information I need to go my own way.

So what information wouldn't you be getting? To "go your own way", you need exactly the same information that the client workstations use to test one key. The difference in your code and the clients exists solely in how they determine the next key to try. You're not "participating" when you go your own way. You're working on cracking the cipher, but you're not adding your efforts to the group effort, you're working independently. I'm not saying this is "wrong". You're supposedly a free person, do what you think is right.