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Distributed.net Forum IRC Logs
acidblood writes "The distributed.net forum held up in SlashNET today has just finished! Lots of questions regarding stats, future projects and other subjects were answered. A log of the conversation is available here. Thanks to everybody who participated!"
Isn't there some more readable way to generate an IRC log? Like joining consecutive utterances by the same person into a single entry, or colour-coding to make it clearer who said what. Maybe it's just because I'm not an experienced IRC user, but these text logfiles seem almost unreadable.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Lets see how well you can interpret it.
I feel like my eyes are pointing in opposite directions now.
My favorite part of the discussion:
[19:20:41] * bwilson pets the cow
Seriously, it's in there.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Even here, AMD rocks- did you read the part where they say: "The most recent AMD processors have better hardware rotate support than the most recent Intel ones...
:-)
I just LOVE my AMD...
A more readable version is here:2 8.html
http://www.slashnet.org/forums/DCTI-200209
Link
IRC is not even close to being a semi private protocol. Talking in a channel is more like yelling to be heard in a crowded room more then anything else,
/msg a bit less so. Channels are public.
DCC is a semi private protocol,
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The work you complete in a distributed project like this can be written as:
keys/sec for a typical CPU of the project
times
number of participants
times time spent (seconds).
As for the first we have Moore's law, which will probably continue to be accurate for some years to go. So that's a very good thing for d.net. Unfortunately the number of active participants isn't growing, and may well start to diminish with a timeframe as this. And that leaves time spent to get us there.
Rc5-72 is basicly just doing rc5-64 over again. There's no novelty value, no sense of accomplishment. It's just the same again, but 256 times bigger. I think people will change to other more instantly gratifying projects. SETI has a very pretty graphical client, public nterest and it's something new if you've been at d.net for 5 years.
In 10-20 years when Moore has made computers fast enough, that this project is accomplishable, there will be noone left to work at it.
The great thing about RC5 is that it is parameterizable. One of the parameters is the machine word size, which can and will be changed from 32 to 64 bits when 64-bit CPUs become commonplace. In fact, Ronald Rivest wrote the following on his original paper on RC5: ``as 64-bit processors become available, it should be possible for RC5 to exploit their longer word length.'' The 64-bit transition also means the cipher's block size is upped to 128 bits, which is considered a Good Thing(TM) by cryptographers.
However, the current RSA Secret Key Challenges have, indeed, fixed machine word size at 32 bits and will not benefit from 64-bit processors.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
IRC is (usually) a cleartext communications system. That says it all right there.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Considering that RC5-72 is 256 times bigger than RC5-64, I don't think that it's going to be cracked any time soon. Even with Moore's Law in place, you're STILL talking about a 10+ year project to crack this code. This brings up two interesting questions:
* How many people are patient enough to wait that long for the job to finish? D.net has already lost a lot of geeks to the flashier projects like SETI, and most people just don't have the attention span to complete a long project without some periodic rewards along the way.
* What will it prove when they finally complete their task? If it takes thousands of computers over a decade to crack the code, are you REALLY going to be able to convince anyone that code isn't secure enough for basic data encryption? Sure, some paranoid government folks might panic, but the general public really isn't going to care.
From the FreeBSD -STABLE man page:
...]
NAME
fold - fold long lines for finite width output device
SYNOPSIS
fold [-bs] [-w width] [file
DESCRIPTION
The fold utility is a filter which folds the contents of the specified files, or the standard input if no files are specified, breaking the lines to have a maximum of 80 columns.
The options are as follows:
-b Count width in bytes rather than column positions.
-s Fold line after the last blank character within the
first width column positions (or bytes).
-w width
Specify a line width to use instead of the default 80
columns. Width should be a multiple of 8 if tabs are
present, or the tabs should be expanded using expand(1)
before using fold.
I've been doing the dnetc research since day 1, and attributed 18 months ago some CPU cycles towards the SETI@home (Got above the 10000 Units completed). But I got a bit annoyed with the way the SETI@home clients where optimized. Compaq, SGI and Sun had some specific highly-optimzed code and this made them compete in the Big Companies class, but the word then was there was no need to further optimize the x86 clients as it was good enough. So I decided to contributed all my cpu cycles to dnetc (rc5/ogr).
Just for the record, we also have a list of the questions that were sent to the bot, but not used due to time constraints. The d.net guys were nice enough to hang around for an hour or so after the forum was over (and after the log ended) to chat with everyone who stuck around.
For those wanting a more readable version, try the HTML version.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
The correct block seems to have been turned in back in July, and even though it's reasonable to not expect to have find it by now, shouldn't they have kept the stats up for what was done since? Seriously - the stats page seems to have been rewinded back to July and they seem to be pretending that then is when people stopped submitting blocks. This doesn't make me want to help Distributed.net in any future projects.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
If men are not afraid to die,
it is of no avail to threaten them with death.
If men live in constant fear of dying,
And if breaking the law means a man will be killed,
Who will dare to break the law?
There is always an official executioner.
If you try to take his place,
It is like trying to be a master carpenter and cutting wood.
If you try to cut wood like a master carpenter,
you will only hurt your hand.
-- Tao Te Ching, "Lao Tsu, #74"
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