:: 31-Jan-1999 21:45 (Sunday) ::

OGR coding is coming along well. I have reached a state where I have a
workable core for at least the next few ruler lengths. The next step for
me is to add OGR capability to the master and proxy network. Mark and Oliver
of the original OGR effort will be working on improving the core code.

As always, there is no specific date set for the start of the OGR project.
We are all working hard to bring OGR to your desktop as soon as possible.
OGR will, of course, be an optional project if you prefer to continue
working on RC5-64.

I have seen some speculation that OGR is dependent upon the v3 core, but
in fact OGR will be included in version 2.8 of the current client (the
current version is 2.7105). You may be sure that OGR is not holding up
v3 development in any way. :)

:: 30-Jan-1999 05:16 (Saturday) ::

The following clients have been updated:

rc5des434-linux-x86-mt-glibc2.tar.gz
rc5des434-linux-x86-mt-libc5.tar.gz
rc5des434-linux-x86-nomt-aout.tar.gz
rc5des434-linux-x86-nomt-libc5.tar.gz

Enjoy!

:: 26-Jan-1999 17:02 (Tuesday) ::

Yeah, stats are effectively useless lately. The machine has been
noticeably slower since we added the third drive and with the influx of
new people due to DES-III and the added interest in stats the poor little
pentium just hasn’t been able to keep up. I know how frustrating it is,
just bear with us as we scramble to get statsbox-ii out the door. Just
consider this a real-world example of why IDE sucks. :)

:: 25-Jan-1999 07:04 (Monday) ::

Unfortunately, the DNS RP/LOC project has been put on hold. While it will be excellent to have
new proxy/master monitoring with automated contact stuff in place, my current priority is
writing all the keymaster log transferring scripts in perl. A combination of flush-stats.sh
and compress_logs.sh problems over the past week are to blame for stats being 45 minutes
late every day. I plan to finish up the log push utility in the next couple days and
the new proxyinfo utilities in early February.

The subspace plots are also a priority. Having them not updated for so long is completely
unacceptable, so I apologize. Expect those back in the coming weeks.

As trite an excuse as this is, I’ll blame DES for the delay on all this.

-daniel

:: 20-Jan-1999 06:43 (Wednesday) ::

Well, it’s now “official”, although there was little doubt as to the
outcome. EFF will be the non-profit receiving the US$6000 portion of the
prize money from RSA Labs. Here’s how it works…

We (distributed.net) receive US$10,000 from RSA Labs, which is
divided up as follows:

Selected non-profit: EFF (http://www.eff.org) US$6000
Guy who found the key: John Gilmore US$1000
John’s Team: 1661, Libertarians for Privacy US$1000
distributed.net US$2000

For more detail on how this was determined, you’d invited to view
http://rc5stats.distributed.net/money.html

Also, the final DES-III stats are up and published. Just as a point of
explanation, the numbers slightly differ from the 22.2% complete figure
as announced in all the press releases. This is just due to slight
differences in how we had to cut the data. The 22.2% complete figure is
accurate as of 14:15, when Deep Crack submitted the winning key. stats,
however, run on one-hour incremental logs, so the stats database is
actually calculated through 14:59. The slight overage reported on stats
is the result of this 44 minute differential. Sorry for any confusion.

Again, ignore the keyrate information, since it’s not dealing with a full
day of stats. Remember, this is a /cool/ thing that we didn’t manage to
do a full 24 hours. :)

Anyway, I’m down for a decent night’s sleep, it’s only ~01:00 local
(that’s nearly six contiguous hours of sleep!) Thanks again to all the
participants who make this possible. We really kicked ass this time.

:: 20-Jan-1999 02:05 (Wednesday) ::

I would like to thank everyone who was able to make this happen. We couldn’t have done this had
it not been for the endless hours that the coders put in, the contribution that John Gilmore
and EFF made, and most importantly, the tens of thousands of users who are running the client on
their computers.

Congratulations for a job well done. Our progress was amazing.

:: 20-Jan-1999 01:58 (Wednesday) ::

We did it. Woo woo; you all rock. :-)

:: 19-Jan-1999 19:27 (Tuesday) ::

It is with considerable excitement (and quite a bit of relief) that I can
now announce that the DES-III contest is officially ended.

At 07:15 am PST (14:15 UTC), just about the time when we all started
getting worried about the 24-hour waypoint, the solution to DES-III
arrived. The winning key, 92 2C 68 C4 7A EA DF F2, revealed the
plaintext message:

The unknown message is: See you in Rome (second AES conference,
March 22-23, 1999

The winning key was found by EFF’s Deep Crack hardware, and submitted to
the distributed.net servers immediately. RSA confirmation of the success
followed shortly thereafter.

It’s truly been a joy and a thrill to work with John Gilmore and the
other talented and clued people at EFF. Were it not for their
contributions to distributed.net, the 24-hour deadline would have been
a mouch more difficult goal to reach.

I’ll be running stats for the partial 19-Jan work up to the point of
success and posting them this afternoon for the archives.

More details will follow soon as the dust settles, RSA is planning a
12:00 noon PST announcement at the RSA ’99 Convention. Both John Gilmore
and our own Peter Gildea will be in attendance.

Here’s a few statistics on our aggregate success:

Start of contest: January 18, 1999 at 09:00 PST
End of contest: January 19, 1999 at 07:15 PST
Elapsed Time: 22 hours 15 minutes
Percentage Complete: 22.2%
Size of keyspace: 72,057,594,037,927,936
Keys Tested: 16,017,142,616,948,736
Blocks Tested: 29,834,253
Overall Keyrate: 199 Gkeys/sec
Peak Keyrate: 250 Gkeys/sec

:: 19-Jan-1999 06:57 (Tuesday) ::

OK, Stats are mere minutes away from being made public.

In what is sure to be a vain attempt at avoiding a full inbox in the
morning, let me mention that “gnu@distributed.toad.com” is John Gilmore,
the man behind EFF’s Deep Crack. No, he has not spoofed blocks. Yes,
that block count is completely legitimate. That’s Deep Crack.

Also, all time-dependent estimates (keyrate, odds to complete, etc) are
grossly underrepresented because the calculations mistakenly assume that
we’ve had the full 24-hour day to do the work listed. This is obviously
not the case as the contest didn’t begin until 17:00 GMT.

As soon as we’ve had a full 24 hour day behind us, this will
auto-correct. (that’s assuming the key isn’t found in the next few
minutes. :)

Thanks for your patience. I’d like to remind everyone that Quake and
Unreal are not permitted until the key is found. And stop listening to
those MP3s! ( for the humor-impaired)

:: 19-Jan-1999 04:58 (Tuesday) ::

Well, call me paranoid but I decided to do a database dump of the stats
database before I dug into migrating everything over to DES. That’s why
there’s been such a delay in getting DES stats posted.

In short, though, the “stats run” has started and I’m watching with some
concern as it chunks through day 0 of the DES-III stats. I’m fully
expecting some weirdness overall, but I don’t anticipate any major
problems. A lot of the calculations in stats are lazy and assume that
there’s at least two days of activity, which may cause some calculations
to break. Plus, since the emails and teams databases carry over from
before, I’ll have to manually clear out the rankings offsets from their
RC5-64 values.

Still, it’s looking promising and things are proceeding relatively
uneventfully. Thanks for your patience, and thanks for helping this be
the smoothest and most impressive project rollout to date.

Things are going great behind the scenes, and we’ve actually had enough
free time to have a platform war or two on IRC. :)