RC5-72 Clients Available on distributed.net

Yoda2 writes "From the distributed.net site... 'The RC5-72 project is now officially up and running, as of 03-Dec-2002! You will need to download a new client in order to participate. Our FAQ-O-matic has been updated with the beginnings of a new RC5-72 section.' Also, there is a $10,000 prize for the winner, but as with the other RC5 projects, the owner of the computer that finds the key does not get all of the money."

Comments

Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an outdated, unused cipher with a completely unused keysize. Do something useful, like protein folding or golomb rulers. (Not SETI@Home, I said useful ;-)

This is a waste of time

[TerryAtWork]

We KNOW it'll take a lot of computers a long time to crack the code.

These cycles would be a lot better spent on something constructive like the protean folding project.

Re:This is a waste of time

[gid]

No doubt, idle computers use less power, and generate much less heat. I stopped running all of those programs once I found this out.

Re:Is this even worth it?

[athakur999]

Especially since one of the goals of the project (from this page) was to show that the US policy dictating the maximum keysize was out of date. That policy has since been changed and there is AFAIK, no restriction on keylength anymore (but you still can't export to "bad" countries).

The "Because it's fun" one is bizarre too. I'm sure it was fun writing the client and developing all the server side stuff. But if you just run the client in the background and get any excitement of that then you need to get out more ;)

But, as always, it's their computers and if they want to run this contest more power to them.