Slashdot Mirror
Hosting Problems For distributed.net
Yoda2 writes "I've always found the distributed.net client to be a scientific, practical use for my spare CPU cycles. Unfortunately, it looks like they lost their hosting and need some help. The complete story is available on their main page but I've included a snippet with their needs below:
'Our typical bandwidth usage is 3Mb/s, and reliable uptime is of course essential.
Please e-mail dbaker@distributed.net if you think you may be able to help us in this area.'
As they are already having hosting problems, I hate to /. them, but their site is copyrighted so I didn't copy the entire story.
Please help if you can." Before there was SETI@Home, Distributed.net was around - hopefully you can still join the team.
Maybe they should go in for distributed hosting, like say one machine that just houses the IP address and a few thousand mirrors that the requests can be directed to as they come in. Not only is it a project that is just ASKING to be performed by distributed.net, but if they make some catchy point and click (i.e. EASY to use) clients that anyone with a large following can use, we might see the end of such things as Slashdot subscriptions and a resurgence of the "community" feel of the web.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
A continuous three Megabits per second works out to somewhere just under a Terabyte a month. Not going to be cheap.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I sell a commercial SSH client and dabble in cryptography as a hobby - so I guess I fall in to the first category. There are plenty of reasons to be interested in cryptography aside from the Ashcroft/FBI-mandated ones, though. My issue with the cancer stuff is that if these companies are going to make billions off some cure (and if they come up with a cure, they sure are), I'm of the opinion that *they* should be the ones putting the billions into the research, not costing my cycles/power. I wouldn't give my facilities away to any other commercial venture for free, why should the situation change because they want to make money off cancer patients?
If the distributed cancer network weren't there, and if it's really performing a genuinely useful job for the companies, you can be sure they'd be investing the $x million required to just buy a supercomputer or three to do it for them. So the only difference I see the cancer project making is that it's saving huge pharmaceutical firms a few million dollars. The world's cryptographers, most of whom are academics (ignoring the NSA-employed ones for a minute) don't have the millions of dollars to throw around if d.net wasn't there - neither do the mathematicians interested in the results of d.net's other project, Optimal Goulomb Rulers. As a result, I see d.net as making more of a difference than the cancer stuff.
All that said, those are my reasons for running d.net - you've got your own reasons, and it's your own choice.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
By proving that RC5-56 can be broken by simple home PCs (with an algorithm as simple as you call it "counting to a million by ones", they IMHO did a large part to educate lawmakers that the age old U.S. export restrictions have to be overturned.
And they succeeded in this.
What I however don't understand is why they kept doing their cryptography projects afterwards. Proving that RC5-64 is breakable while you can buy 256 bit encryption freely is indeed just a stupid waste of CPU cycles and bandwidth.
I'd like to see them discontinue RC5-64, and concentrate their work on OGR and maybe on other, new projects.