:: 16-Feb-2009 07:39 GMT (Monday) ::

Howdy all,

We are now at 97% complete for OGR-26 and have fewer than 600 thousand
stubs left to go. This will likely take us less than a week, unless
you can round up some more folks to run dnetc on their computers!

As we approach the final days of this project, there will be periods
of time where no OGR-26 work is available from the network. These
occasional periods of unavailability occur because we want to avoid
re-issuing the remaining stubs too many times. This is not a cause for
concern, but if you don’t want your client to go idle, you should
verify that RC5-72 is enabled in your configuration files. (It is by
default.)

Once we have fully completed OGR-26, we will be able to officially
launch our next project, OGR-27. Since the new project relies on the
proven results of the previous project, we don’t want to launch OGR-27
while its predecessor is still in progress.

While we are all waiting for the new project to start, we invite you
to begin preparing your computers to participate in the new project.
To work on OGR-27, you will need to be using the v2.9103 client for
your architecture. If you run a personal proxy, you should upgrade to
build 347. You can find these new versions on our official download
page at http://www.distributed.net/download/

We thank you for your continuing support and enthusiasm as we look
forward to this exciting new project.

Moo!

:: 29-Jan-2009 03:24 GMT (Thursday) ::

Dear friends,

We are proud to announce that we have now completed 75% of the work necessary
to prove OGR-26 is optimal. The project is expected to complete within the next
few weeks, and we have already started preparations towards that project’s
successor. More details will be provided in the near future.

As you know, we recently published some pre-release clients that allowed our
early-adopters running high-speed hardware platforms to make use of larger
RC5-72 packets. As a part of this testing, our users have helped us to discover
that there is a bug in our stats tabulation code that counts these larger
packets as only one stats unit. We are fortunate that no stats credit has been
permanently lost. We will be correcting the bug and re-tabulating the affected
logs shortly.

As part of introducing large RC5-72 packets, we needed to update our proxy
systems to handle them. Unfortunately, a bug present in proxy build 346
invalidated a small number of work units by distributing blocks from subspaces
other than “CB”. This was spotted and resolved very quickly and we do not
expect that very many users received these invalid RC5-72 packets.

We thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm. We particularly
appreciate the work of early-adopters that are willing to help us test our
pre-release software and give rapid feedback.

Moo!

:: 25-Oct-2008 23:14 GMT (Saturday) ::

distributed.net is proud to announce the completion of OGR-25!

A little over eight years ago, distributed.net users undertook the
search for the optimal 25 mark Golomb Ruler. This year sees the
successful conclusion of that effort. We have proven conclusively by
the exhaustive search of all possible rulers that the previously
predicted 25-mark ruler is indeed the most optimal one.

The total length of the ruler is 480, with marks at positions: 0 12 29
39 72 91 146 157 160 161 166 191 207 214 258 290 316 354 372 394 396
431 459 467 480. (This ruler may alternatively be expressed in terms
of the distance between those positions, which is how dnetc displays
them: 12-17-10-33-19-…)

This shortest ruler was found by two independent computers. The
initial report was received on October 10th, 2007 and a second,
matching result was returned on March 24th, 2008. However it was not
until the final stub was returned and verified that we could rule out
the possibility of a still-shorter ruler. This final stub was returned
on October 24th, 2008 drawing to a close the complete search of all
possible stubs. Due to the nature of an exhaustive search,
distributed.net users have also proven that the above solution is
unique (the ruler’s mirror notwithstanding).

To celebrate the successful end of yet another distributed.net project
all our contributors are invited for a drink…when we find a place
large enough to host the 124,387 people that participated in this
particular distributed effort. :)

As previously mentioned, a successful match of the shortest ruler was
found by two independent computers. We’ll be sending those two users
some free distributed.net swag and shirts for their noteworthy
contributions to the project. We’ll also be sending some swag to the
user that submitted that last confirmed stub. (At the time of writing,
we had not yet received permission from those three users regarding
the publication of their identities.)

Related Links:

* http://www.distributed.net/ogr/
* http://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=25

Thank you all and keep those computers busy!

:: 25-Oct-2008 06:36 GMT (Saturday) ::

Dear friends,

It is a great pleasure for us to announce that OGR-25p2 was fully
completed a just short while ago! We’ll be providing some final
details regarding the mathematical results from the project
completion, as well as the details of our new project, later today.

With that in mind, I’d like to recommend that your clients are
switched over to RC5-72 as soon as is practical for you to do so. For
many of you, this is a non-issue, as your client will switch over
automatically. We will shortly be rolling out a new project which we
have been working on and hope that you can bear with us as we complete
our preparations.

We thank you for your continuing support.

Moo!

:: 30-Sep-2008 16:22 GMT (Tuesday) ::

Dear friends,

As you know, we are drawing to the conclusion of the OGR-25p2 project,
with less than 1% remaining and we estimate project completion
sometime within the next month. You can view the latest OGR-25p2
project percentages here:
http://stats.distributed.net/project/ogr_status.php

We have noted that a significant amount of work is not being counted,
due to being held out of the system for a long time and completed by
other users before it is returned. In some cases, it is returned even
after stubspaces have been closed. At the current stage of the
project, a workunit which isn’t returned within two weeks of being
issued will have a high chance of being recycled and processed by
somebody else. This duplicated workunit will still be credited in
personal stats, but it won’t have any value to the project.

One of the stubspaces currently open will take only two days of
concerted effort to close off. If we are to calculate at full
effectiveness, it is vital that work is completed and returned in a
timely fashion.

If your computer has a connection to our key servers or a local proxy
server, we recommend that you keep your client set to the default
buffer settings to avoid buffering an excessive amount of workunits.

Additionally, if your client is configured to participate in only
OGR-P2, we encourage you to consider enabling your clients to
participate in both OGR-P2 and RC5-72. Over the next few weeks, we
anticipate there being occasional periods of time when there will not
be any OGR-P2 workunits available, due to the recycle delays and
timeout periods. By enabling your clients to also process RC5-72, you
will ensure that your computers will not go completely idle during
these periods.

Finally, we would like to mention that we are currently finalizing a
next-generation OGR project that will further the exploration into
even higher-order Optimal Golomb Rulers. Stay tuned for more details
later.

We would like to thank you for your continued support and your ongoing
efforts to help us.

Moo!

:: 08-Sep-2008 02:09 GMT (Monday) ::

Dear friends,

As announced on May 21, 2007, RSA Labs officially discontinued their
sponsorship of the Secret Key Challenge and withdrew the monetary
prize they offered. However, we have been continuing to run the RC5-72
project without their sponsorship. Effective with this announcement,
we will officially fund the prize using the same distribution ratios that
we would have originally used, as per
http://stats.distributed.net/misc/money.php?project_id=8

* The individual who finds the key US$1,000
* The winning individual’s team US$1,000
* Free Software Foundation (winning charity) US$2,000

Although the option of privately funding the prizes had been discussed
publicly on the mailing list and we had internally decided this
several months ago, we thought it would be prudent to officially
announce this position to our participants.

These prizes will be paid from our organization’s general purpose
funds. If you would like to make donations to us and designate them
for use as a prize, we will gladly honor that request. If we receive
designated contributions exceeding the above totals, then the excess
will be paid out in proportion to the above ratios. To donate to our
organization, please see http://www.distributed.net/donation.php

Moo!