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.

Comments

Re:Aliens, crypto or cancer - what's your choice?

[NineNine]

As far as I can figure out, the only people who would be "strongly interested in cryptography" would be cryptographers, terrorists, money launderers, and purveryors of kiddie porn. Call me nuts, but unless you fall into one of those groups, I don't see why the interest (paranoia) is warranted. I agree with the first poster. My cycles go to medicine. Whether or not it's commercial, I don't care. If my cycles help to invent a cure that I have to BUY somewhere down the line, I'll gladly buy it.

Reality

[tomstdenis]

The only reason you "submit" blocks is to get stats. If all the clients just did random blocks of keys you'd expect the key to be found equally as fast.

To top if off the finder of the key gets the *full* 10,000$ if they don't go thru d.net.

What incentive is there for d.net now?

Tom

Re:Reality

[tomstdenis]

What the heck is this?

The algorithm probably checks for ASCII characters [e.g. the top bits of each byte is zero]. You can't decrypt just one byte in CBC mode with RC5.

What is to say I don't make my own client that does the same thing except it locally logs such hits [statistically they are 1/256] There are other things you can check too... for example the chars inside the body are likely to be in the range 32..127 which is 96 chars of the 256 possible. Statistically that is (96/256)^8 or 1/2048. There are multiple blocks which gives you 2^{-11N}.

So its just as easy to write your own client. The challenge is finding users. But like I said earlier. If you are going to run it anyways you might as well run your own client. You stand equally as much chance.

Tom