Factoring challenges considered boring

[Tim May]

On Monday, September 3, 2001, at 05:55 PM, V. Alex Brennen wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Steve Schear wrote:
>>
>> At 12:34 PM 9/2/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>>>
>>> "Anyone a remailer, anyone a mint" is one strong approach.
>>
>> I know this suggestion has been made before, probably by myself, but it
>> seems the remailer programmers may be missing a good opportunity in not
>> pursuing the inclusion of remailer code in the popular Gnutella cleints
>> (e.g., LimeWire).  They advertise they are looking for new "content
>> communities."  http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/formgroup I don't see 
>> any
>> reason why email can't be added as a new form of content.
>
> I haven't heard this before. It's a good idea.
>
> I've tried to contact limewire about working with them on some
> distributed resources coding concepts.  I found them unreceptive.
> They suck.
>
> I've started on the very beginnings of a GNU Distributed Computing
> client to attack the RSA RC5 and factoring challenges.

Jeez, why waste time on such an old-hat idea?

I'm serious. The latest factoring and RC5 challenges do nothing new. 
Neither does using a bunch of machines. Been there, done that, got the 
tee-shirt.

Better that you and other programmers spend effort on exactly what this 
thread is about: putting interesting features into Morpheus, Gnutella, 
etc. Better yet, using this P2P power to do a better version of either.

But factoring challenges are old news. You're about 5 years too late 
(not that it was terribly interesting even 5 years ago...).


--Tim May