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!"

Comments

Does anyone read logs like this?

[Ed Avis]

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.

Re:Does anyone read logs like this?

[littleRedFriend]

I agree. I have put up a formatted version of the log here.

Re:Does anyone read logs like this?

[Jamie Zawinski]

Isn't there some more readable way to generate an IRC log?

Yes, run it through my irc2html script.

My favorite part

[User 956]

My favorite part of the discussion:

[19:20:41] * bwilson pets the cow

Seriously, it's in there.

More readable version

[Anonymous Coward]

A more readable version is here:
http://www.slashnet.org/forums/DCTI-2002092 8.html

A more clickable version

[Crazieeman]

Link

Re:Privacy issue ?

[Tridus]

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,

DCC is a semi private protocol, /msg a bit less so. Channels are public.

Re:Obsolete

[acidblood]

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.

Any bets on how long RC5-72 will take?

[leonbev]

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.

Re:Any bets on how long RC5-72 will take?

[Bishop923]

Sure, some paranoid government folks might panic, but the general public really isn't going to care.

I don't know about where you live but very few of the "general public" really gave a damn about the RC5-64 project... Not exactly something that lead the news in the typical area.

I doubt the "average" computer user thinks about the security of their data beyond the vague "evil hackers might get my AOL account" mindset.

That said, at the current rate, RC5-72 should take less time than the estimated completion time of RC5-64. (figure rc5-64 started 4+ years ago when the PII was the hottest thing around and clock speeds increased by tens, not by hundreds, of MHz)

Re:Any bets on how long RC5-72 will take?

[silentbozo]

I only switched to SETI yesterday, after wondering for several days about what to do with the two machines that MUST stay on all the time (or else bearings in the fans and drives sieze... - all the other machines that were used for RC5 that don't have to stay on are now off.) Why not switch earlier? Easy - the money! If they decide to put RC5-72 on the plate for distributed.net, you can bet I'd run my machines on that.

This is a good time to use fold(1)

[smnolde]

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.

HTML Log

[drdink]

For those wanting a more readable version, try the HTML version.

July

[Decimal]

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.