> Hey, we could write a Java procedure so that whenever someone connects
> to http://www.lycos.com and http://www.yahoo.com, etc - their web
> browser checks 10000 keys and report the result. The server can keep
> track of what key space has been checked, and if a web client doesn't
> report back in 15 minutes, it asks the next client to check that space
> again.
When Java first came out, several friends of mine had the idea to write
Distributed Involuntary Crack, which would bounce a little ball on the
screen, while brute force cracking a chunk of someone's password file in
the background. At the time, the Java compilers we had were bad enough at
optimizing that it was little more than a project showing the dangers of
Java, but from what I've seen, it might actually be workable now.
Chuck McKenzie
charlesm@cs.wisc.edu
UW-Madison CS Webmaster