Slashdot Mirror
Finding MD5 Collisions With Chinese Lottery
Stanislav Shalunov writes "Jean-Luc Cooke posted a Usenet article describing a distributed webpage-based effort (Chinese Lottery) to find a collision in the MD5 function. All you need to do to participate in the effort is visit the URL that loads the code. The author comments: 'What is interesting about this approach - when we reach final release stage - is that any website that adds this small snippet of code to their pages will have their visitors working on the problem for the duration of their visit to the site'."
From the link:
;)
You run an Applet, it reports to us the search results. Distributed computing without installing anything...and without people knowing you're stealing their idle CPU time.
I don't know about you but I wouldn't lean out the window with the fact that I'm stealing from others.
Idle CPU time might be unused but I still want to know what my box is doing and why.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
I respect the effort and ingenuity, but the rationale that "hey, we're helping solve a problem" somehow justifies stealing someone else's resources... it's just wrong.
Be upfront with people - tell them why it's so important, what can be accomplished with it, and what it does. You'd be surprised - people might help out of *gasp* the goodness of their own hearts. A good example might be SETI, etc.
Have you ever tried even using a dedicated renderfarm? The complications that can arise if you don't have all the textures and files locally, not to mention the fact that rendering is so heavy a tax on the CPU people would NEVER want to do it. Plus, that would involve them releasing files that go into making the movie. And so on and so forth, The idea is so terrible I couldn't imagine anyone ever trying it. Peace out and try to talk about something you konw for once.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
Why don't the slashdot editors who put this online embed the code in the story page? That way the slashdotting would have some use at least.
-- Alper
I believe the term was parasitic computing. Ideally the web master makes visitors aware to what's going on. You're using visitors' computing power to accomplish a neat sort of distributed computing. Great idea, if you're not just stealing resources
I wonder if the good slashdot people would be willing to make this into a slashbox ?
Basically, in a world where everything was based on a thumbprint, would you want even the smallest chance, no matter how statistically unlikely, that someone else had the same thumbprint as you?