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RC5-64 Success

Posted by michael on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

Peter Trei writes "After over four years of effort, hundreds of thousands of participants, and millions of cpu-hours of work, Distributed.net has brute forced the key to RSA Security's 64 bit encryption challenge, winning a US$10,000 prize. Still outstanding Challenges carry prizes as high as $200,000. RSA's PR release is here. d.net's site has not yet been updated." Update: 09/26 16:59 GMT by CN : The good folks over at SlashNET are having a forum with the distributed.net crew on Saturday at 21:00 UTC. It'll be a great time to meet some of the people who made this possible.

5 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Good job folks by chainrust · · Score: 2, Troll

    Nice, except for the fact it doesn't matter. It wasn't even the real encryption code. Also, it never would have happened without distributed processing, so this isn't a real demonstration of computing power, but actually a demonstration of distributed computing power.

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    1. Re:Good job folks by chainrust · · Score: 0, Troll

      It isn't. If someone wanted to apply a mass amount of computing power at a problem, they couldn't do it distributedly because you rely on geeks interested in your cause. Those geeks might in short supply if you wanted a distributed application for, say, figuring out the genome for rats. Don't post comments without thinking. It can only lead to trouble.

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  2. Re:Sponsored by your local electric company... by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1, Troll

    I'm not going to get drawn into an argument over why we're in a conflict with Iraq, or even whether or not we need the oil.

    Nor do I ask you to.

    The answer question is 0.

    I disagree.

    You've forwarded the proposition that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers had to die to run the decryption. Which yields the converse: If wasn't run, no U.S. and Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.

    No, the converse is: If it wasn't run, fewer U.S. and/or Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.

    Which is patently untrue. You're attempt at an emotional appeal as an argument was not only weak, it was stupid. You might as well have said that not turning off your lights when you're not using them causes soldiers to die.

    I believe that to be an accurate statement.

  3. Re:Sponsored by your local electric company... by LiquidPC · · Score: 0, Troll

    No, the converse is: If it wasn't run, fewer U.S. and/or Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.

    That's absurd. There is no relationship between the amount of energy americans use to the amount of soldiers that die.

    Plus, we're not going to attack Iraq, assuming we do, because we want their oil. Maybe you should read up on that?

  4. Re:Sponsored by your local electric company... by LiquidPC · · Score: 1, Troll

    If Iraq didn't have oil, we wouldn't be attacking them. Hell, if Iraq didn't have oil, they wouldn't be dangerous.

    Right. Kind of like how we attacked afghanistan for oil, eh?

    By the way, you should probably stop responding to posts because you're killing soldiers every time you make stupid fallacies on slashdot.