:: 15-Jan-1999 18:05 (Friday) ::

Greetings from distributed.net!

Our DES-TEST-2 was a successful failure, in that we didn’t find the key
within the 56 hour time frame, but we were able to fully test the
functionality of the clients and proxies. It turns out that the key was
assigned a few hours before the contest closed, but wasn’t returned in
time for a “win.” A sincere thanks to everyone who had their client
participate in the contest.

Now, the big topic. DES Challenge III. DES-III begins at 09:00:00PST/
17:00:00UTC on 99-01-18 which is just next Monday.. We have 56 hours to
find the key. While this may sound difficult, since we didn’t find it
in our second test, keep in mind that there are lots of other elements
that will allow us to speed up between now and then. One of the major
factors is EFF’s Deep Crack. It’s now official, this custom made DES
cracking machine will be checking keys for distributed.net at the rate
of 88Gkey/s.

Many of you have expressed concern to me about having your clients
crunch DES since you won’t get ahead in RC5 stats. First of all, I would
like to remind you that DES-III is very important to distributed.net.
This is our chance to show that large scale Internet distributed computing
can be used for short term contests such as this one. We will be hosting
DES-III statistics, so don’t worry about not having stats throughout
the contest. At most, this is just 56 hours of your cracking
time, so we would appreciate it very much if you could put RC5 aside
on Monday and check DES keys.

Please take the time and upgrade your clients to the latest v2.7105
clients available on and
. For those of you who
haven’t upgraded recently, the newer v2.710x clients have DES quick-start
code which allows clients to start cracking DES shortly after the
contest begins instead of having to wait for the clients to automatically
flush/fetch blocks. Also, v2.7105 contains Bruce Ford’s new DES MMX
cores. For those of you with x86 MMX processors, you will see a huge
speed increase. I highly recommend you upgrade and be sure you have
DES enabled in your client configuration.

Please be careful about buffers during this contest. We need
quick turnaround with blocks for this contest, so don’t keep hundreds
or thousands of blocks buffered. A setting of 5:5 would be perfect
for the average online client. Personal proxies tend to minimally
buffer about 500 blocks, so please don’t run a pproxy unless your
situation demands that you do.

Thanks again to everyone running the client and to everyone who has been
burning the midnight fuel to get this off the ground. Feel free to
join us in our IRC channel (efnet: #distributed) on Monday to
watch this take off.

Good Luck!

Daniel Baker
dbaker@distributed.net

:: 14-Jan-1999 07:09 (Thursday) ::

DES-TEST-2 is coming along very nicely. Our key checking rate seems to be holding
stead at about 100 gigakeys a second.

However, we still need everyone to install clients wherever you can and upgrade
to fordbr’s new x86 DES cores.

Remember, DES-III is less than a week away and we will only have twenty-four hours
to snag the key. Be sure to devote all your power to DES.

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

With few bumps, DES-TEST-2 is now underway. If you haven’t done so already, please
upgrade your clients (http://www.distributed.net/clients.html) to v428. Not only
will you see increased functionality, but a huge speed improvement for x86 clients.

Keep cracking, keep upgrading, and expect an announce@ post from me shortly in
regards to DES-III.

:: 10-Jan-1999 06:20 (Sunday) ::

I just notified our DES-TEST-1 winner via telephone that one of his Macintosh PPC’s
running rc5des v2.7103 had successfully solved DES-TEST-1. While there was no prize for
this contest, Daniel Preston (dprestn@ucla.edu) seemed thrilled to have beaten
the odds. The best of luck to him and everyone else in future contests.

:: 09-Jan-1999 07:32 (Saturday) ::

I’m proud to say that DES-TEST-1 was a success; we found the key.

See http://www.distributed.net/pressroom/dbaker-des-test-1.html for
more information!

:: 06-Jan-1999 21:07 (Wednesday) ::

We’re having an increasing amount of problems on the keymaster in terms
of stability. Because of this, you may see proxies that appear down or
out of blocks on proxyinfo (http://distributed.net/des/proxyinfo.html) in
situations where it may not be the case. Do not be alarmed. If you
transmit blocks to/from a full proxy, they WILL get processed by the
keymaster at some point in the future.

:: 05-Jan-1999 07:27 (Tuesday) ::

Unfortunately, your stats are once again expected to be low.

Combining the issues with yesterday’s master problems and today’s
upgrades to the the far-from-flawless v300 have the master to get
behind almost half a million blocks.

We’re working around the clock to resolve the difficulties, but I
can’t guarantee that the missing blocks will make it into tomorrow’s
run. Even if the master was performing flawlessly, it would be
difficult to flush an additional 250 megs of buffers into it.

Fear not, your blocks have NOT been lost. They’re sitting safely
in a large queue to be processed. Once the master is stabilized,
I will begin having it process that queue. At that point, I’ll
post here with estimates on when you should expect your stats to
even out.

:: 03-Jan-1999 20:45 (Sunday) ::

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but everyone’s stats are going to be
low today. We had some technical difficulties on the keymaster that caused
it to get severely behind on processing blocks for several hours yesterday.

I’m going to try and slowly feed back the 250,000 blocks that it has yet to
process slowly, but I don’t think nearly all the blocks will make it into
today’s stats run. Fear not, however, none of your blocks have been lost. Any
blocks that don’t make it into today’s stats-run will make it into tomorrow’s.

:: 02-Jan-1999 21:36 (Saturday) ::

Unfortunately, we’ve had to postpone the DES-TEST contest for 24
hours. It will begin at 9:00PST/11:00CST/12:00EST/17:00GMT.

This time will allow us not only to further test the new proxy and
master code, but will also give Bovine time to further coordinate
activities with Deep Crack.

In the mean time, please upgrade your clients to ones that
are aware of “DES Quickstart” among other things. The new clients
are available at ftp://ftp.distributed.net/pub/dcti/v2.7103/

:: 14-Dec-1998 15:51 (Monday) ::

In an effort to fully test all of the DES components of our network in
prepreparation for DES-II-3, we plan to run a full DES contest
simulation. All clients with DES enabled will autoswitch to DES during
this time as they would in a normal contest.

Purposes of this test contest:

– Allow us to practice the DES-enabling process on the keymaster so
there is no confusion on the morning of January 13th, the actual
contest’s start date

– Test the rapid deployment of DES contest data and blocks across the
network

– Obtain an accurate network speed estimate, allowing us to predict the
time required to check the keyspace in full during the real contest.

This simulation will begin on Saturday, January 2nd at 09:00 PST and
will run until we find the key. There will be no cash prize associated
with this test run, but your efforts and CPU power will lend a big hand
in helping us prepare for DES-II-3.