Hi John,
first, I'm running my clients in the SolNET challenge. (Currently not the
smartest thing, if my goal was to win the contest with 'my' effort, but
watch out for our new clients :-)
Second, the contest is to break DES, not to beat others to it.
I already think we (the Internet community) have won. Not only is it
possible to rally up so much people for a single cause, it can also be
accomplished two times (or three if you count SGI). It's just a 'great
feeling of a global community', to watch these hundreds (?thousands?) of
people put time and effort into a global effort. Whereas people's homepages
try to center the Internet around them, these challenges let people be only
a small little gear in a very large machine, and people love it!
Because of this, I sure hope after DES has been cracked, everyone will
switch to the Bovine RC5 crack and give them a super-turbo-mega-boost. If
we can keep the momentum, most RSA challenges will be cracked in no time
(well almost no time).
Maurice v/d Zwaan