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Another Distributed Computing Effort: CSC
Armin Lenz writes "DCypher.Net, a newly formed distributed computing effort, takes up french encryption specialist CS Group on their challenge to break their 56 bit CS-Cipher key.
After successfully completing beta testing, the project officially launched Monday, November 8. During the first days only basic stats will be available, but contributors are invited to download the final client and start work asap.
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Unfortunately, the only clients listed are all Windows clients.
If only a Linux or BeOS client existed, I'd be glad to lend a few extra CPU cycles. As demonstrated by both SETI@Home and Distributed.net, non-Windows clients tend to run faster and with fewer problems - meaning this would probably be cracked faster than the pure-Windows user base.
Oh well. I suppose we have to enlighten the world one step at a time.
In some way, yes. But distributed processing is generally done for things that can be broken down into discrete pieces - analysis of data, data decryption, and so on, because those tasks readily lend themselves to being analyzed piecemeal.
Other tasks, examples being word processing or web browsing, aren't nearly as discrete as the above types of data analysis. Those sort of functions are ones that lend themselves towards a singular solution, namely by being only one process.
Given how we don't push our computers to the limit, I fully expect that in the future we will have software that will allow our spare cycles and spare computational power to be harnessed for arbitrary distributed processing (a basic first step would be to develop a generic Java client that could download new classes from a central server). But there will always be tasks that are easier, and more efficient, for having a single central processor.
(Disclaimer: I am not a distributed processing expert, only a layman with unsubstantiated opinions.)
Moo!
Although some competition would be great among the distributed computing projects, dcypher.net seems to have picked a bad contest to try and get off the ground with. Perhaps more of a "marathon" challenge would be optimal, instead of the "sprint" that CSC provides.
We had already announced our intent to do CSC, and have an enormous amount of computing power in comparison to the newly-formed dcypher. Dcypher really can't expect to beat us to the CSC key, and after one unsuccessful challenge, their users will likely be unmotivated to stay around.
At this point, our CSC/OGR clients are only in a beta testing phase; however, based on the few hours that we've been running this public beta, our key-checking rate is at least twice that of dcypher. We'll probably be releasing the final clients in the next week or two, and at that point, our rate will be large enough that we should be able to exhaust the entire keyspace in a few weeks.
Daniel
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Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net
Now, perhaps I'm just being paranoid, but sounds too much like a great opportunity for data mining to me. Especially when you consider that a) you will have to register some user information so they can track your computational contribution and that information will of course be attached to all data the client sends back and b) you're never going to see the source code for the client, and since you're probably going to be sending back blocks of funky not-really-decrypted text, sniffing the datastream isn't guaranteed to root out any other information they might have coded up and embedded in that data.
I don't know who these people are, but the fact that they're offering for-pay advertising at the very beginning of the project just doesn't bode well. They might have good intentions, but how far will those last when some advertiser offers a check with lots of zeros in exchange not just for banner space but also for the list of usernames/emails of the people running their client?
If a project is going to ask for information about me, as any distributed computation project is almost certainly going to want to, then they just need to stay out of the whole Advertising for Dollars game, especially in the digital world where it's so hard to see what exactly they're doing with your data.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Why didn't the authors instead submit their code to distributed.net to have the distributed.net client process this new project? We all have distributed.net's clients (in the sense that one exists for just about anyone). Another group trying to make a name for themselves but not being inter-compatible ... would be nice if people joined projects instead of creating new ones for a change.
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Sure the porting process would be faster, but it would scare of a lot of potential processing power. As you well know, there are several organizations doing distributed computing, so a new client is competing with all of those organizations. To be successful it will have to be friendly to its users. Windows users like programs with a gui. Personally I would prefer it to minimize into the traybar where it doesn't bother me. Alternatively i would like to run it as a service, that way it wouldn't bother me at all.
Jilles
Err... You're wrong, and yet right at the same time.. wow, good job!
SETI and d.net and in fact the entire internet are "client-server". The Web is client-server. Telnet is client-server. Nearly every single piece of software on the internet is client-server. It really doesn't say a lot about what the software does, though..
Seti@home and d.net are distributed computing.
Let's define distributed computing, shall we? According to PC Webopedia here, distributed computing is:
In the specific cases of seti@home and d.net, they are taking a large project, splitting it up into small pieces, and running it all over the place. Now, there may be a problem, as our definition above implies that each "object" running on each system is different. We can define our object as being our code, but we can also, more intuitively, define our object as being our code running on our data. This conforms more towards the object-oriented methodology. All the objects are inheriting the same source code, but different data. Each bit of code running on each person's computer is running a different bit of data. This is the whole point, in fact. So therefore, all the objects are, in fact, different instances. There we go. Good enough for me.
Damn, I must be pretty bored to respond to that post.. Hmm.. Guess I need a beer.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
d.net used to open source all their clients, at one time. Naturally, someone mucked about with the code and starting faking keys back to the system. It was a bit of a shambles when they finally caught on. The reason they don't release the source except to a small group now is to prevent anyone from overcoming their security measures... However, if you're mainly interested in the algorithms, they'll give you those. But not their entire source, because of the security issues.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Don't automatically call me people as though I somehow represented all of Slashdot. I see this happen a lot. Read my User Info page and see what I've posted.
... to some extent ... but when everyone just starts their own project instead of helping someone else's, they all move slowly.
I don't claim that competition is necessary. In fact, if Microsoft actually valued its customers and technology as much as it does its money, it would be quite plausible for me to "like" Microsoft because they would be making better software. As it is, I think competition is good in that circumstance because they aren't attempting to innovate and move quickly with technology but are falling behind (often) what hardware can do and aiming for the lowest common denominator.
Distributed.net does a very good job of what they do and if they released their source code at all to the public (maybe not the part that does the network interaction), it would be very easy to add to it. Modularity would be even better. But why not communicate with them about it in the first place? On a more personal note, I help program GICQ. There are about a dozen Linux ICQ clients, all based on each others' source code to some degree. Sure, lots is good
Just my $0.02 worth.
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)