OK, some of you may have heard about RSA's Secret Key Challenge.
Basically,
it's a contest to break ten secret key encryptions. The one currently
being
attacked heavily is a 56-bit DES encryption and the prize for breaking
it is
$10,000. 56-bit DES is a very standard encryption, but RSA wants to
prove
that normal people with PC's can crack it, hopefully to encourage the
standards to go to 80-bit or higher encryption. There's a coordinated
effort
to crack DES going on the internet, started by Rocke Verser. The
individual
who actually cracks the code will keep $4000 and the programming team
will
keep the other $6000 if we crack the code. I'd encourage anyone who
spends a
significant amount of time on the net, or anyone who might be willing
to dial
in while they're asleep and the lines aren't busy anyway (say midnight
to 7 am
or something) to take a few minutes and look at:
http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm
There are clients for almost any platform imaginable, and they all run
at low
priority, so they shouldn't interfere with any real work or play. I
just run
mine whenever I'm on and I never even notice it running, not even when
I have
5 copies of Netscape, my email client, my news client, and my FTP
client
going.
Colin L. Hildinger
Games Editor - OS/2 e-Zine!
http://www.os2ezine.com/
The Ultimate OS/2 Gaming Page
http://www.ionet.net/~colin/games.html
The Official Unofficial AWE32 and OS/2 Warp Page
http://www.ionet.net/~colin/awe32.html