Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 18:27:54 -0700 (PDT) From: Murray Stokely <murray@cdrom.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Cyberian RC5 Effort - 'Anti - Microsoft!' Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.970829182420.7337A-100000@pooh.cdrom.com>
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Greetings FreeBSD Hackers! As most of you probably know, there is currently a massively distributed computing effort to crack the RC5-56 alogorithm and prove that current US encryption restrictions are ridiculous. You probably remember several months ago, when a FreeBSD Pentium 90 was responsible for finding the key in a similar contest to break DES. What you may not know, is that there are currently two efforts to find the key. The Bovine effort at http://rc5.distributed.net, and the Cyberian effort at http://www.cyberian.org Aside from the general goal of proving the inadequecy of 56bit cyphers, the Cyberian effort also offers you $5000 for finding the winning key! It's come to our attention that a large majority of you are involved with the vex.net team on the Bovine effort, and we'd like to invite you to join our 'anti-ms' team with Cyberian. But wether you join our team, or someone elses, there are many reasons why you should consider Cyberian instead of Bovine. - Cyberian has much faster clients - Cyberian has WORKING stats.. updated every 5 minutes. (bovine just now got the stats working, but they are very limited and updated only daily) - The Bovine team is COMPLETELY unresponsive to offers of help. People on the Bovine mailing list are constantly asking for new features, and someone always offers to do it. But the Bovine team wants to keep all the credit to themselves when the key is found, so they don't let anyone help out, and they CONSTANTLY come up with excuses and delays. - There is no statistical advantage to using Bovine over Cyberian at this time. Bovine checked the first 6% sequentially. So Cyberian didn't have to check that space, therefore they've technically eliminated 8% of the keyspace. This means that roughly one key in 10 that Cyberian checks has already been checked by Bovine. Since the Cyberian client is more than 10% faster on most systems, you're only wasting your time with Bovine. - Cyberian has its act together in all aspects of the effort. Most of the early Bovine enthusiasts have long since switched over. Cyberian is more fun, more focused on the real goal of disproving the strength of 56bit encryption, and more in tune to the needs of a REAL dynamic distributed computing effort. - Bovine uses Windows NT servers, Cyberian uses Unix ;) Our particular team is strongly unix based and definately anti-microsoft. We're currently ranked 79th, but we're rising fast! We've got alot of the computers here at Walnut Creek CDROM running, as well as two 6 processor SPARCs at Depaul University! Check out http://www.cdrom.com/cgi-bin/rc5stats.cgi?anti-ms for our current statistics. We've got a mailing list, a web page, and several cgi programs to cache the stats page and reformat them. Email us at anti-ms@baic.com if you have any questions! Murray Stokely
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