Paul Goyette <paul@whooppee.com> writes:
> If you don't think that looking for alilens is a worthwhile way to spend
> your spare CPU cycles, then consider joining the NetBSD RC5 team at
> distributed.net.  Maybe not as sexy a project, but demonstrating the
> ability to "crack" a supposedly unbreakable cypher probably has more
> relevance to all of our daily lives (encryption, ITAR, etc) than the
> extremely remote chance of finding ET!

Not really. Everyone pretty much knows how many CPU cycles cracking
RC5 of a particular depth requires, and frankly, all this does is help 
RSA DSI's marketing department. Sorry to be a party pooper, but RC5
cracking is damn useless. It was one thing to show DES could be
cracked, but showing large key RC5 requires half a year of heavy work
from hundreds of thousands of machines isn't exactly a help.

OTOH, doing science work with your spare cycles seems like a really
good cause to me. It is unlikely anything will be found, but it sets
an excellent precedent for future CPU cycle donations to science, and
indeed to future (more likely to succeed) versions of the same project.

Perry