Main

03-Jul-2006	Starting tomorrow the mailing list and member form updates will be offline due to vacation until August 9th :)
03-May-2006	New client build 497 is out (for a few weeks now) for x86 with MMX optimized OGR-P2 assembly cores, 14-46% faster depending on architecture! See the D.Net download page.
10-Jan-2006	We have overtaken the Anandtech team and are ranked 3^rd overall in OGR-25, phase 2. Stats/member list updates and mailing list were unavailable since 21-Dec-2005 due to vacation (and the homepage being unaccessible a few days before that, hence the late notice, sorry for that).
30-Aug-2005	Due to a disk crash some info was lost (last backup was 7 weeks old), if you (un)subscribed to the mailing list or submitted membership info (via web form) between 03-Jul-2005 and 26-Aug-2005 please submit your info again. I can rebuild some of this from the pages on the site but not all (no list subscription info and E-mail addresses for anonymous users for the membership list are stored on the site), will look at this the coming week. Update: the missing entries from the member list have now been readded to the local 'database', no need to resubmit forms for that.
14-Jun-2005	New client build 496 is out for some platforms, if you have an x86 CPU it's worth upgrading since OGR-P2 has a new optimized assembly core which shows a nice boost (28% on a Pentium M here, 11% on older Athlon XP). Look for it in the prerelease area.
19-May-2005	If you downloaded the build 495 client for x86 already, another bug has been found (on some newer CPUs identification bits are trashed, could result in wrong core selection amongst others), so get the new 495b build from the prerelease area. AmigaOS/MorphOS clients are not affected (as always :).
18-May-2005	Due to a few bugs found in x86 RC5-72 cores (AmigaOS/MorphOS clients are unaffected) new clients all around have been released (build 495), in some cases some speedups as well.
11-Apr-2005	Site was unavailable for a couple of days due to some unforseen server shuffling, sorry for any inconvenience :)
02-Nov-2004	After 4 years and 3 months of crunching nodes, OGR-24 has finally been completed, with the Distributed Amiga team ending up in the 4^th position out of 4976 teams, well done people :) This confirms the previously known best Optimal Golomb Ruler with 24 marks as optimal. OGR-25 stands at 10-15% of phase 2, or 65% overall. The full press release from Distributed.Net: distributed.net is proud to announce the completion of OGR-24! Four years ago, distributed.net users undertook the search for the optimal 24 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 currently best known ruler is indeed the Optimal one. More precisely it is: 24/9-24-4-1-59-25-7-11-2-10-39-14-3-44-26-8-40-6-21-15-16-19-22 This shortest ruler was found by two independent computers. The initial report was received on May 24th, 2004 and a second, matching result was returned on July 3rd, 2004. However it was not until the final stub was returned and verified that could we rule out the possibility of a still-shorter ruler. This final stub was returned October 13th, 2004 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). This project was first announced in 1998, started in February 2000, and is now concluded in 2004. Although 4 years may seem like a long time, the search was no trivial task. No fewer than 555,529,785,505,835,800 rulers were checked during that time. Moreover, a second pass of all rulers was done to rule out (heh) any errors. Additionally a small oversight in the beginning of the project caused several rulers to be excluded from the initial search. These were the subject of the much discussed Phase 2 (rulers with initial marks > 70). Incidentally the optimal ruler was amongst these. ("9+24+4+1+59 > 70") The double phase, phase 2 and their verification each required additional structural changes which also contributed to the overall 4 year duration. Note that distributed.net users continue to pursue the solution to the OGR-25 project which began in parallel with OGR-24. We have currently completed 10-15% of OGR-25 phase 2 which is about 65% overall. 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 41,805 people that participated in this particular distributed effort. :) The shortest ruler was first found by Matt Richards (Matt_R in #distributed). It was then confirmed by Mitsuru Aoki of the SEGA Users Group Team (#1958). The final stub was returned by Sebastian "Pax" Schmitz. We'll be sending them some free distributed.net swag and shirts for their noteworthy contributions to the project.
03-Sep-2004	AmigaOS 4 PPC client now also supports AltiVec, as always, see the download section for details.
20-Aug-2004	The Distributed Amiga effort is now 7 years old! (still two more weeks though :) Additionally, new clients are out (build 494), with improved OGR-P2 cores for a speedup that depends on CPU, including 68k (up to 64% on Opteron systems, 6% on my Amithlon machine, 22% for my gaming box with Athlon XP Barton), see the download section.
21-Jul-2004	New clients are out (build 493), the main improvement being faster (21-68%) PPC assembly OGR-P2 cores, see the download section.
13-Jun-2004	Renamed team to 'Distributed Amiga' from 'The Amiga RC5 Team effort' to cover efforts other than RC5 better.
27-May-2004	New clients are out (build 491), main attraction is improved OGR-P2 speed.
16-May-2004	All build 490 clients have now received official status, so have moved from the pre-release area at D.Net to the release one in case you can't find them :)
12-May-2004	OGR-P2 has now officially started, no more stats credit will be given for OGR-24/25 'first phase'. Make sure to upgrade your clients to the latest build (490)! Also set OGR-P2,OGR=0 in the project order, although the new client switches over automatically when all proxies run out of old buffers you won't get credit for them.
09-May-2004	OGR-25 is at 100%, with that it's time to finish both OGR-24 and 25 by doing the small remainder 'micro' stubs. This has been dubbed 'phase 2' or OGR-P2 (a.k.a. 'finalization'), and new cores are needed to fit this into the current network infrastructure. AmigaOS and MorphOS clients are ready, for some platforms they have been uploaded to the pre-release area at D.Net now. The new clients will do OGR-24/25, OGR-P2 and RC5-72, within about a week OGR-P2 will go live, at which point distribution and acceptance of OGR-25 work units by key-proxies will stop, so unless you participate in RC5-72 only, you must update to build 490 clients then (otherwise the client will go idle). For an explanation of OGR phase 2, see Bovine's .plan, for downloads of the new clients see the download section. If you have set this manually, take note that the new clients use *.v29.distributed.net key-proxy addresses. For those of you running personal proxies, they need to be updated to build 341 for OGR-P2 as well. Update: 68k, WarpOS, PowerUp and native AmigaOS4/MorphOS clients are now all available for download.
05-May-2004	We have moved up into 3^rd position in the OGR-25 stats after Team Hungary STB+ has been dropped a bit (stats recalculation?)
23-Apr-2004	Stats are back after a month downtime due to hardware failure at distributed.net and we have just taken the 4^th place from Slashdot in OGR-25 :)
23-Feb-2004	The MorphOS client has been updated to build 489 (minor bugfix for upcoming MorphOS 1.4.2 update), see download section
01-Feb-2004	The MorphOS client has been updated to build 488b (minor bugfix), see download section
20-Jan-2004	A prerelease MorphOS specific client (build 488) is up at D.Net, apparently AltiVec is supported with the soon to be out MorphOS version 1.5, resulting in an excellent rate (Screenshot of the MUI front-end).
11-Dec-2003	New clients are out for some OSes (not AmigaOS), with mostly minor fixes, see the (pre)release links in the download section.
01-Nov-2003	The server was down for a couple of days due to a system failure but is now back up.
02-Oct-2003	It has been quiet for a while as clients are stable so the sixth anniversary of the effort has gone by quietly, but rest assured the efforts are still on track. A note on OGR-24 completion: the completion bar at D.Net has been sitting at 100% for quite a while now, this is due to the hard to quantify nature of how much work OGR stubs represent, the simple math that generates the completion percentage is apparently a bit optimistic. Some minor work still remains (lots of stubs that take seconds to minutes to complete), these will probably be done by D.Net themselves as it would not be worth burdening the network with. There is no projected date for completion though. The same goes for OGR-25 currently sitting at 77.80%.
07-Apr-2003	As promised, new AmigaOS clients (build 483) are now released with faster RC5-72 cores on both 68k and PPC, see the download section.
13-Feb-2003	United Devices have split off the LigandFit cancer research and other projects from their main site (although you can still find it at ud.com after some searching), they are now hosted at www.grid.org. The member/team/project databases are the same for the moment apart from cosmetic changes, though there are small differences in the project settings. It would seem grid.org will have the more up to date version as time passes, if any link on this site becomes out of date or breaks due to changes/divergence between ud.com and grid.org (and I don't notice), please mail (note address has been obscured to thwart spambots, replace at with @ and remove the capitalized word).
01-Feb-2003	United Devices are launching a new project next to the cancer research one, targeting virus research against bioterrorism. This seems a commercial project, please disable it in your device settings at ud.com if you participate in the LigandFit project (remember that new projects are switched on by default).
28-Jan-2003	Some details on the new RC5 cores: since RC5-72 uses 3 instead of 2 registers on CPUs with 32 bit register size it would be expected that the calculation gets slower (in addition to the increased keyspace size). Additionally, on some platforms ANSI C code is being used for a while instead of hand optimized assembler until such optimized cores are available. This is reflected in the current Amiga cores, for 603e@240 MHz the RC5-72 core is 60 Kkeys/s down compared to RC5-64 speed (and was somewhat slower in ANSI C), but the good news is, since we all know Amiga coders are amongs the best ;), that for 68k there is practically no difference already, and a new 603e optimized core is underway which will also completely eliminate the difference. Similarly, 604e optimizations are being looked at. Quoting Malcolm: "Frankly, I don't see why all the x86 cores are so slow :-)". Then again, it is worth mentioning that under Amithlon's 68040 emulation the rate is just as high as it was before :)
27-Jan-2003	Here's the news and there's quite some: RC5-72 is underway - new clients are out, including new 68k and PPC optimized cores! MorphOS is now also supported with the PowerUp client. Make sure to flush old work (including OGR) before upgrading, the buffer format has changed. The remaining bits of OGR-24 are finally being reissued, this means it will be finished soon, please switch to OGR, we are ranked 3^rd there :) ('24' is being interleaved with '25' stubs, no manual intervention necessary). With the new clients we also welcome Malcolm Howell aboard as coder. Some volunteers for other projects like folding@home are still welcome.
26-Jan-2003	Due to circumstances I didn't have net access for over a month, some much needed updates to the site will be made in the next few days as I catch my breath (and announcements/linking of such items as new clients)
04-Dec-2002	RC5-72 is now officially underway, although there are no Amiga clients yet. You need an updated client to participate in this (v2.9xxx), also keyproxies for RC5-72 have changed so if you have set them by hand you may need to change these. For now you are advised to continue with OGR and/or LigandFit, though the decision is up to you of course. The website update is still pending (blush..).
27-Sep-2002	RC5-64 effort finished! From the D.Net pressroom: On 14-Jul-2002, a relatively characterless PIII-450 in Tokyo returned the winning key to the distributed.net keyservers. The key 0x63DE7DC154F4D03 produces the plaintext output: The unknown message is: some things are better left unread Unfortunately, due to breakage in scripts (dbaker's fault, naturally) on the keymaster, this successful submission was not automatically detected. It sat undiscovered until 12-Aug-2002. The key was immediately submitted to RSA Labs and was verified as the winning key. So, after 1,757 days and 58,747,597,657 work units tested the winning key was found! That means 85.5% of the keyspace needed to be searched for the winning key. The reason why it took a month extra to announce the find (during which another 3% of the keyspace was searched) was due to scheduling conflicts with RSA Laboratories and difficulties in reaching the (anonymous) person who found the key. During the almost 5 years the RC5-64 effort has been underway 331,252 individuals took part out of which 2770 were members of our Amiga team who accomplished about one percent of all the work. The Amiga team ended in the 7^th position overall (out of no less than 12,639 teams!), which is pretty amazing considering 46% of our machines consisted of supposedly 'slow' Amigas. Even more amazing is that in the five years since RC5-56 was finished the number of Amigas in use in our team decreased only from 52.7% to 46%, which shows that even though the platform is allegedly dead, Amiga enthousiasts are more than tenacious and still a force to be reckoned with. So what happens next? OGR-25 is ongoing and we are ranked 4^th overall there, check your clients whether they are set to automatically switch, if not then please set them to continue with OGR (you may have some difficulty getting some work downloaded for a couple of days as everyone is switching of course). It would be a shame to lose that kind of exposure. According to the the above linked D.Net PR, RC5-72 might be undertaken as well in the (near?) future, although with the current amount of participants that would take something like 15-20 years at a rough guesstimate so doesn't seem very worthwhile unless the effort gets lucky or more people join. Theoretically it could be finished faster than RC5-64, eventually though (undertaking even heavier ones like RC5-80) it would take too long. Then again we do not know what computing advances are in store for the next decade or two, quantum computing or massive participation would make short work of this kind of encryption. Needless to say you should delete any leftover RC5 buffers so your client doesn't do superfluous work. You could also run the cancer research client LigandFit (previously called THINK) if you have a Windows machine, even concurrently with OGR. D.Net are researching the addition of other efforts to the current infrastructure and we as a team are looking for ports for others as well, so stay tuned and keep cracking :)
08-Sep-2002	Updated the THINK Cancer research client's description which is now called LigandFit, see the misc section. We have someone working on an Amiga client for a silly project that counts keystrokes called Dolphin too, more on that later :) If you have a Windows system you could already join the existing Amiga team, it doesn't take exactly a lot of CPU time so can be run together with other clients. Completely forgot to mention that the Amiga RC5 Team Effort is now 5 years old! (as of 20-Aug-2002) Time flies when you are having fun (and discover just how long "Two More Weeks" is :)
31-Aug-2002	The vacation took a little longer than expected (which is good ;), except the backup connectivity broke down in the meanwhile, sorry to those who have been waiting for updates etc. All things are back now, RC5 is ever so closer to being finished at nearly 87%. New clients out: build 473 is available from the usual place, including description of new features.
14-Jun-2002	RC5-64 has passed 80% completion a couple of days ago, at current rate in the unlikely/unlucky event that the whole keyspace has to be searched we are looking at another 188 days of searching only. This weekend I'll start a month (or thereabouts) long vacation so member updates and mailing list will be down for the duration.
19-Apr-2002	New client builds 472 are out, see the download section for details. The client now has a built in ClassAct/ReAction GUI. RC5-64 is standing at 75% done!
12-Apr-2002	The keymaster (for RC5/OGR) is being physically moved, so currently flushes/fetches are not possible. This means that if you run out of work your client will either switch to random blocks, switch contest or stop altogether, depending on your settings. Perhaps it's a good idea to keep an eye on this and possibly switch to something you have buffers left for, or another project like UD-THINK until the keymaster returns.
02-Apr-2002	If you have or are thinking about installing Kazaa it's interesting to know that according to recent news the software includes a hidden client which can amongst others be used for distributed computing purposes. You cannot install it without agreeing to the EULA which states "You hereby grant the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer/s and/or Internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing" and "The user acknowledges and authorizes this use without the right of compensation". This basically means your computer could be appropriated for ad-serving or whatever commercial distributed computing purposes the client's distributors decide on. If you see a sudden drop in your RC5/OGR rate or other willingly installed distributed computing client you know why. I suggest using an anti ad/spyware program such as Ad Aware or looking for alternatives to Kazaa. Note however that almost all other equivalent peer 2 peer software contains some form of ad or spyware too.. Furthermore, some spyware is now actively disabling anti spyware programs, so it's important to keep these up to date. This is not an April fools joke, you have been warned. Other news: RC5-64 is now at 73.7%, getting close! You may want to switch to RC5 to give the effort that last mile boost.
21-Feb-2002	United Devices have finished the anthrax screening project, so even if you didn't switch it off everyone should now be participating in the cancer research project again. Later this week they will (auto) update the client with a 1.5 MB download, so your connection might be up a little longer.
13-Feb-2002	The site was offline for a few days due to an unexpected change in servers, and is now kindly hosted by sixgirls.org, courtesy of John Klos. Incidentally, the server is an Amiga 4000/060 running BSD :)
22-Jan-2002	United Devices have started a new project called 'Cure Anthrax', we do not participate in this one so make sure you switch it off and only have 'Cancer Research' selected. See the (updated) textfile on this. Other news: RC5 is over 2/3 done at 67.4% yesterday.
22-Dec-2001	As of today member list updates are on hold until the 6^th of January due to vacation (you can submit forms of course, they will be processed later). The mailinglist will be down as well due to a dying fan in the list machine that might cause problems if left unsupervised. Have a nice xmas and a cracking new year everyone!
22-Nov-2001	Moved form submission to XS4ALL, due to abrupt end of service from Cistron you may not have been able to send in your data for a couple of hours, this is now fixed. Note also that if you are linking to the Amiga RC5 button (see lower left of this page), you may have an old link with a Cistron URL, this does no longer exist and should link to the image at distributed.amiga.org. See the details on what to change this to on the advertise us page.
14-Nov-2001	Fixed a long standing bug in the member stats (not all N/A's being counted), stats should now mostly be statistically correct :), also added Amithlon (not counted as 'Amiga', but counted for AmigaOS obviously) heading and updated submission form accordingly, also added new CPU info etc. to form.
11-Nov-2001	As of now all E-mail addresses have changed from cistron.nl to xs4all.nl, that goes for contact information, list addresses etc. All webpages have been updated accordingly, if you see some old addresses remaining, please mail (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word)
08-Nov-2001	As of 01-Nov-2001 UD have decided to discontinue cash prizes and promotions indefinitely, citing the economic climate, conserving expenses and the idealistic motivation rather than monetary of participants. This does not impact us since you were only eligible for prizes if contributing to another (commercial) effort of theirs, which if you did set up things correctly should not be the case anyway.
28-Oct-2001	The RC5-64 effort has now reached 60% of the keyspace (2 days ago). Chances are ever increasing we will find the key now, so keep cracking :)
20-Oct-2001	Check out the miscellaneous section for two UD THINK utilities that add some missing features to the client (such as caching and dialup access regulation). Also updated the text on the UD-THINK effort.
24-Sep-2001	Well, both 'Yahoo.com' and BOFH@Chalmers dropped back to where they were (ranked somewhere in the neighbourhoods of 400+ and 5000+), so either their megaflushes were a database glitch or a spoofing attempt by malcontents, meaning that we are back up to 4^th overall in OGR-25 :)
23-Sep-2001	'Yahoo.com' team has caught us with another unexpected megaflush in OGR-25, we are now ranked 6^th overall in that contest. Keep cracking! :)
16-Sep-2001	More bad news: Patrick Ford, a member of our team and vocal Amiga supporter has died of a heart attack this week, leaving a wife and three children. Rest in peace Patrick, we will remember you.
15-Sep-2001	BOFH@Chalmers have taken both us and the Russian team by surprise with a megaflush of over 3 million OGR-25 Gnodes, with that taking 4^th position from us. Fixed an old JavaScript bug (IE4 legacy..), navigation bar should now also work fine with Opera (but still doesn't with IBrowse 2.1 at least, so I switch it off for that browser). As for the tragedy that took place in the US this week I won't waste words, most of the net is dealing with it now; just wish to say good luck and strength to those of you who are directly affected. Indirectly everyone is affected of course, this also has an impact on privacy and laws dealing with for example encryption, unfortunately not in the positive sense.
09-Sep-2001	Updated UD stats script to reflect proper and up to date values. There is a chance the *cistron.nl addresses may disappear in the future, if this happens the mailinglist and private/support mail addresses will change of course, to be announced if/when that happens.
02-Sep-2001	Back from vacation, as you might have guessed the mobo replacement didn't happen before, but it has arrived now, so everything is working again (including mailinglist, the backlog of submissions etc.). Next on the todo list is to incorporate the extended UD stats from their own pages as the current ones are broken (used a third party site that worked fine for a short while but now seems to have given up on it).
24-Jul-2001	Due to a failed motherboard replacement in the main effort machine (desktop Amiga 4000) the mailing list will be down for a week (this is the dealer promised period for the replacement, it took a month to get the replacement mobo for the ailing one in the first place), idem for site updates (such as membership list, news items, stats). Apart from this, due to vacation no website updates will occur between the 10^th and end of August. Unless the motherboard replacement doesn't happen before then the mailinglist will continue to function during the vacation period. Keep your fingers crossed :)
14-Jul-2001	Status update: The OGR-24 project is now on its first anniversary. Judging from the small amounts of work done every day by only a couple of people (and decreasing), it should really be closing out the last bits. Hopefully this means we will hear soon about the results. OGR-25 is going strong, as is RC5-64 (now over 52% done). The THINK project has 47 members in the Distributed Amiga team now with over 6 CPU years contributed (the stats page compilation is out of date for the rankings since a couple of weeks now, we have progressed quite a bit since what the last available data portrays there). Also of note: this is why you shouldn't run clients just anywhere unless you are authorized to do so. D.Net has confirmed the story (see nugget's .plan). It should be interesting to see this unfold, hopefully the absurd penalties the prosecution asks for will be dealt with swiftly.
15-Jun-2001	We have reached the 50% mark in RC5-64! In 1331 days we have searched half the keyspace. At yesterday's rate the entire keyspace will have been searched in another 506 days, which shows that the effort is progressing much faster than in the first half. Also since the key could be anywhere in the keyspace, not finding it in the first half basically means we didn't get lucky, but also that chances of finding it are ever increasing. It could take over a year more (which is progressively getting more unlikely), or it could take another day.. The Amiga team is still ranked 7^th overall out of thousands of teams, well done team :) Added press release about the halfway mark to the press section.
13-Jun-2001	A new project called Exodus will soon start using the UD client, this is a commercial web performance testing application which is switched on automatically when the project starts. As it is 'opt out', please make sure to switch it off on your device settings page (see the text linked from miscellaneous section for description of procedure and other client/project info) as we do not participate except in the non-profit THINK Cancer Research effort.
24-May-2001	Added United Devices THINK Cancer research statistics to the stats section, updated the corresponding text with new developments (see intro section for link) and updated member form with recent OS/CPU info.
17-May-2001	New (and faster) build 469 RC5/OGR clients are out, see the download section for more info. Development continues on the clients, a native GUI (selectable between shell, Reaction, MUI and whatever others depending on GUI libraries to be added) with functionality and efficiency equal to or surpassing Myzar is one of the objectives. RC5-64 now stands at 47.7% done, the United Devices Cancer research effort (THINK) at 8400+ CPU years with over 370,000 members of which we have contributed over 2 CPU years now with 34 active members, or about 2.5 times as much as the average participant. We have also changed over to a dedicated hosting machine, but this should be seamless.
29-Apr-2001	Due to exceeding the quota on other parts of the amiga.org domain the corporate and member list pages were unavailable for a day or so. The THINK project is going well, we have a total of one computing year in the project now :)
08-Apr-2001	We have joined the fight against cancer in United Devices' THINK distributed computing effort. UD is also the company that employs most of the D.Net programmers. Unfortunately there is no Amiga client yet, Windows only for now. Mac and Linux clients have been announced however. We do continue to participate in RC5 and OGR, but if you can spare some of your Windows PC's cycles you are welcome to switch over to THINK. All you need to do is download the client, which contains the registration (so you get a loginname and password) and visit this page to join the Distributed Amiga team. Some more detailed information has been added to the introduction page. Update: I have added a compilation of some of my experiences and research into UD's website and message boards.
02-Apr-2001	The site was down for a day or so due to running out of quota on the domain amiga.org, this was caused by the huge amount of hits (mostly for the show pictures) after the St. Louis Amiga 2001 show. As an aside, one of the announcements was a fully PowerPC native AmigaOS 4.0, which (and the AmigaONE PPC motherboard it needs to run on) is tentatively scheduled for this summer.
20-Mar-2001	Client version 2.8014 (build 468) is out! This release corrects the problem reported with 466 which forced a withdraw of builds 464-467 and sports some other minor improvements. The OGR core in this build is faster than the one in 463, so please upgrade soon :) See the download page for more details.
16-Mar-2001	We have regained 7^th spot in RC5-64! After 43.1% of the keyspace done we have overtaken the OS/2 team and moved up one spot. OGR-24 and 25 are still ongoing with 24 mainly filling out the last holes.
27-Feb-2001	Bug update: the bug is general in nature and was detected with a build 466 (v2.8012) Windows client (details are described here), but could pertain to all platforms and client versions above 2.8010 (build 463). The Amiga clients out (v2.8011, build 464) are probably unaffected, however all versions above build 463 are regarded as invalidated and have been pulled from the D.Net download section, so until the next release you need to downgrade all clients to build 463. The work submitted with build 464 and up does receive credit, but this will shortly end, so finish the packet the client is working on and reinstall build 463 (2.8010). The next release, which is probably going to be v2.8014 (build 468), will solve this issue.
25-Feb-2001	Apparently there is a bug in all 2.8012 clients (build 466) which makes them to return bad results. D.Net advises to revert to 2.8010 (build 463) for now. It is at this time unknown whether this affects RC5, OGR or both, but my guess would be OGR only. Also it is unknown whether the current Amiga client (2.8011, build 464c) is affected. For now I would advise everyone to revert to 463 which is available from the download section, more info to follow as it is available.
19-Feb-2001	In OGR-25 (201 days on the way) we have been overtaken by the Dutch Power Cows, and are now ranked 4^th overall. Still a very nice ranking, and at current rates in about a month and a half we will regain the 7^th place in the RC5-64 contest (which is now 41.1% done).
04-Feb-2001	The RC5 effort is now at 40%! We are also still gaining on the OS/2 team, and OGR-24 is practically done, both passes have been completely handed out, it's a matter of time to fill out the gaps for pass 2 (i.e. wait until all handed out work units are returned). Also, the effort Amiga 4000 is kinda dying, probably some capacitor trouble on the motherboard. Luckily only non essential functions are affected like sound and floppy, it may continue to operate for years to come without these. I will not attempt repairs until a suitable replacement/backup is present, but just in case all updates and mailing list drop off the air, you know what happened :) (in which case frantic attempts will be made to get everything back up ASAP of course) Lastly, apparently one of our members passed away last Friday. I have no further details, so here's to you, the unknown Amigan. Cheers!
17-Dec-2000	Updated 464c builds are now up on the download page. Other news: Distributed.Net has merged with the commercial distributed computing company United Devices, here's the press release. What does this mean for us? Basically there is no change for us as team, the efforts will continue as before. Several distributed.net volunteers are leaving their old day jobs and joining United Devices full time. United Devices will be providing distributed.net with new hardware and hosting services, as well as sponsoring a donation program that will help support distributed.net's charitable activities. The RC5-64 project is now at 37% of work done. Note that I will be on a two week holiday starting on 22-Dec-2000, in the meantime new member submissions will be delayed and due to a failing PSU in my Amiga 4000 which I dare not leave unattended for that period the mailinglist will be down as well (the replacement PSU did not arrive before the holiday season unfortunately).
11-Nov-2000	Further improved (and much faster on PPC for OGR) 464b builds are now up on the download page, go get them! Also: all PPC users who are cracking RC5 right now, should start cracking OGR again - re-issued stubs for OGR-24 and OGR-25 pass 2 are now being distributed (i.e. stubs that have yet to be cracked), and OGR-26 is likely to be starting as soon as the re-issued stubs from pass 2 are complete. Statistics are now back as well.
07-Nov-2000	Oliver Roberts writes on the mailing list: Just a little something to wet your appetites... I mentioned on the list a few days ago about a new PPC enhanced OGR core. Well, due to bug in the core, general bugs and Amiga specific bugs, I have not yet been able to release new versions of the clients. But, I'm hoping this will happen in the near future - the only remaining issue being the stability issue concerning the PowerUp client, which I'm working on. Anyway, having received some benchmark figures for the 604e, I thought you'd like to know that the result is a 60-70% speedup - that's 3.0 Mnodes/sec (was 1.8 Mnodes/sec) on a 233MHz 604e! The new core doesn't benefit the 603e quite as much, but there's still a 40% speedup - that's 2.5 Mnodes/sec (was 1.78 Mnodes/sec) on a 240MHz 603e! Hopefully the updated clients will be available in time for the impending start of OGR-26, giving a significent boost to the team effort.
05-Nov-2000	The D.Net statistics pages have been down for a couple of days now, some database problems are being worked on and should hopefully be fixed soon.
25-Oct-2000	Improved new clients (build 464) are out! Visit the download section for details on the improvements, and of course to download them. Finally also some good news that looks more substantial than up to now on the Amiga front: Eyetech announced the details of the AmigaOne PPC conversion system which will bring a truly new Amiga one step closer. Together with the no less than three PCI adapter boards (and new PPC cards?) from Elbox, DCE and aforementioned Eyetech this points in the direction of rekindled belief in the Amiga.
24-Sep-2000	Progress update: RC5-64 is 31.8% done, OGR-24 first pass is finished, second pass is done 49%, OGR-25 stands at about 15% (first pass I presume). The Amiga team is ranked 8, 3 and 3 in these. Remember that RC5-64 could be finished the day the key is found (i.e. any day), while OGR requires the entire workspace to be computed.
08-Sep-2000	Since noone replied to the 200K hit request, the prize (um, to be decided :) goes to Joona Palaste. Also, this week the Dutch Power Cows overtook us in RC5-64 and are set to overtake the OS/2 team today as well, but they also seem to be concentrating on RC5 only; our third rank in both currently running OGR contests just goes to show that we can compete in several efforts at the same time and still make a statement. Way to go team! I also hear the 464 builds are on the horizon, with improvements in the form of working lurk mode for example. Lastly, I'm experimenting with a Senfu watercooling kit to make my obstinate Celeron 566 reach 850 MHz (without special cooling only stable at 707), hopefully this will bring another boost to the team instead of fireworks :) Update: It reached 850 and is stable, thanks to some tips from members (upping voltage to what I previously thought were dangerous levels :) This means another 400 Kkeys/s or so (or 900 Knodes/s extra for OGR, currently).
29-Aug-2000	Updated usage section with some troubleshooting stuff gleaned from the mailinglist (hey, I don't need to do a lot of support anymore with our wonderful developers on the ball :), also minor updates to some other parts of the site.
25-Aug-2000	The day before yesterday RC5 clocked in at 30% keyspace searched, the chances are getting better that we find the key every day now. In all of the excitement I completely forgot about the 200K-some hit promise I made earlier, but now looking through the logs the approximately 200 thousandth visitor comes from Canada and was referred to the site through Joona Palaste's excellently weird homepage. So if you accessed this site around the equivalent Canadian time of 04:00 CET on 26-Aug-2000 (which would put you in 25th August I gather) and can tell me your IP (or close enough) plus browser version you use, you can claim the prize. If no valid applications arrive within a reasonable timeframe the prize goes to Joona.
20-Aug-2000	The Amiga RC5 Team effort is now three years old! We have achieved a lot in the meantime, with a lot more to come. Although the Amiga situation has not really improved during that time, the Amiga still lives and may even make a comeback in one form or the other. So keep at it, there's still hope :) Another thing: I made a booboo while updating the site yesterday, the now official build 463 client (of 01-Aug-2000) is the same as the prerelease one which has been online for the two weeks before, and has the unified 040/060 core and other fixes. The lurk mode and other related functionality is still in beta and will make it into the next build (464). This bump is scheduled later also because of other enhancements such as an improved OGR core (7% faster on 060 and slightly faster for PPC).
19-Aug-2000	Back from vacation (tried to miss that train so much ;) I see we are doing great, and OGR-25 has started in the meantime too. OGR-24 is practically finished (it turns out D.Net decided on two complete passes, with the first done and most of the second's 'keyspace' already handed out), we are top 3 ranked in both, even number 1 in OGR-25 for a while. Myzar as well as the clients have been updated again, adding the last missing bits for now. All pages have also been updated to reflect current clients etc. To the right you see what I've been doing (amongst others) and here's a snapshot of that holiday feeling :)
22-Jul-2000	As of this morning I'm on a 3 week vacation, this site will not be updated until after my return. This includes the member list info, stats and download page, so check the D.Net download pages for the latest versions of clients, plus the Myzar site for the imminent update (links in download section). The mailing list will continue during this period in automatic mode.
19-Jul-2000	The Distributed Net RC5 effort (and the Amiga team) is now at it (at RC5-64 to be precise) for 1000 days exactly. During this period we have done about 28% of the keyspace (and finished several other contests in the meantime) and are still ranked in the top 10. Also, we are now ranked third overall for the OGR-24 effort, keep cracking :)
17-Jul-2000	The OGR-24 effort is proving to race towards a rapid finish, already all of the stubs have been handed out, now it's waiting for the 80% or so that has not been returned yet and I presume some small recycling. So if you have anything in your out buffers, flush it ASAP, and lower threshold, if you can to single units (this is for OGR, not RC5). The other bit of news is that the new clients (build 463) are out, see the download section.
14-Jul-2000	Update: after the first OGR statsrun (second OGR-24 contest day), the Amiga team is at number 5, with only 84 members as yet. Note that you also need to set RC5=0 in the load order/preferred contest setting if you only want to do OGR, since if there is anything in the RC5 buffers, the client will then rotate between OGR and RC5. The OGR stats are at http://stats.distributed.net/ogr-24 and the Amiga team's are here.
14-Jul-2000	Couple of items: OGR has restarted! The search for Optimal Golomb Rulers (marks 24 and up) is on again, switch with as many machines as you can, although this contest will be going on for a while as it will do several marks, the first few (24, 25, ...) will probably be dealt with pretty quickly, so let's make a good show here too. It's a good idea to only switch with faster machines (060 and up) and buffer only a handful units at any time, since one work unit may take quite a while, it would be a shame if you didn't flush your work before the current mark is finished. Note that you need to have OGR switched on in the client (this is the default unless you changed it), and use only clients newer than build 460, since old clients either don't have OGR support or D.Net does not accept their work (builds 446 up to 460) because of the previous bug (which stopped the OGR effort for a while). Also, the client will only start work on OGR-24 when it first reconnects to a D.Net proxy to fetch work, so make sure you do an update now (not just flush, but also fetch; the Windows client on my PC even required a restart, I don't know if the same is true for the Amiga client, since I use Myzar which doesn't have some of the settings in the new clients yet so I had to break and restart it anyway to set up OGR). Secondly, the D.Net stats engine has been reworked and there are now two modes of update: an hourly and a daily run (as before), overall stats are still updated daily (shortly this will include OGR as well) but if you are new to the effort, or changed E-mail address, the new info will now show up on a search at most one hour after you have flushed work to the D.Net proxies, so you can get the password and change info quicker. Info on the changes is at http://n0cgi.distributed.net/~decibel/newstats.txt. Next, to lessen the burden of the D.Net proxies, some of them have switched to sending you only 2^31 or larger sized RC5 packets. Obviously you also get 8 times the credit than for a 2^28 sized work unit, and this actually benefits you as well since less time is spent on the networking side, even if progress may seem slower on the larger packets. The next client (build 463, out shortly) should be out soon and will break up packets to your preferred size if you want, so this becomes moot. The latest news however is that this will be removed, there is some debate going on at D.Net about this (because if people do keep splitting them up the network issue isn't completely resolved unless the client reassembles them again on flushing, which opens up other problems, etc.), I guess we will see how this works out (OGR is not affected, since every packet is always one single work unit, which, since the 'size' isn't quantifiable exactly, may vary in the amount of work). Then there is an updated speed ratings system on the D.Net site now (it also lists AmigaOS 3.5 now), look it up for comparison and enter your data if you wish at http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/. Finally, I will be going on a three week vacation by the end of next week, these pages and local statistics, member listing etc. may not be updated during that period. The mailinglist will continue to run though. Oh, and we now have 2000 members exactly, according to the D.Net stats system (actually 2148 according to the internal list, and a couple of hundred more in my own informal database which probably needs a good cleaning :), so hooray :)
08-Jul-2000	All sections (including usage/FAQ/download) have now been updated to reflect the new clients. Also, forgot to mention the press release on the new clients added to the press section last week. Lastly: looks like the other Russian team (hackzone) have finally caught up with us :/ But never mind that, keep cracking :)
29-Jun-2000	The new clients are finally out! Surf to the Distributed.Net download section to get them. This site does not have the latest setup/usage information yet, but this will be updated during the weekend. Remember to flush your old blocks, backup your ini file and recreate it with the `-config` option. Don't forget to set your E-mail address again, and also note that Myzar v2.0 does not handle these clients! (but read on) Myzar has been updated as well, to version 2.1. Download from Myzar site. This version supports only the new clients (460+). Note that it supports most but not all new features of the new clients, such as setting thresholds to a time limit instead of units/packets (this will obviously be updated in the next release). Special thanks to the development team: John Girvin, Kriton Kyrimis, Oliver Roberts, Rask Ingemann Lambertsen, Roberto Patriarca, Roberto Ragusa, Stefan Smietanowski and Tony Preston. Now get cracking :)
23-Jun-2000	We broke the 200 million block barrier yesterday (or as now correctly called 'work units')! The Russians are still gaining fast, but the new clients, for 68k, WarpOS and PowerUp are now very close to release. They are stable, up to date and indeed, faster again :) This should make a lot of people happy..
30-May-2000	The stats server is back again, and 25% of the keyspace has been searched as of the day before yesterday (or day 949 of the effort). We are still ahead of Moore's law (in spite of the other efforts in the meantime), at current rates all of the keyspace will have been searched in another 1170 days (i.e. about 3.2 years), or a year and a half until the 50% mark, even without taking Moore's law into account. By that time of course the other Russian team will have caught up with us, but then again things might look quite different if those new Amigas, or G3/(4?) cards ever arrive..
24-May-2000	The stats server is down, apparently D.Net's statsbox is suffering from HD problems which should be soon resolved. I guess the box sympathized with us losing a place :)
20-May-2000	The bad news: the Russian team caught up with us yesterday and we are now ranked 6^th overall (although doing still more than 1% of all work). Almost 25% of the keyspace has been searched up to now, and some good news might be around the corner with new clients, but more on that when info is available.
16-Apr-2000	Added homepage of Myzar to the misc section.
19-Mar-2000	The new host is now operational, if you have trouble reaching these pages either your DNS is not up to date or your browser (or both). In that case, you can reach these pages directly at http://amiga.org/distributed, or http://209.15.82.153/distributed in case both your DNS and browser are not up to date. (The browser normally looks up the IP number belonging to the hostname and should send a Host: header when requesting the page so the server should know which pages to serve, if it doesn't the server sends the default pages normally served for the IP number, which in case of the old server is Mike's 'Powered by Linux' page and for the new server the main amiga.org pages)
23-Feb-2000	OGR-24 has been suspended! (clients should automatically revert to RC5-64) Due to a a bug with endianness some clients returned some bad work and unfortunately there is no solid way to test all data for this. The contest (24% was already finished!) will be resumed as soon as the bug is fixed. D.Net will also take the opportunity to add some features like better progress report and smaller work units. I have no information on how credit will be given for work already done, I expect some arrangement will be made. There may not be an Amiga client capable of OGR before resumption (first 68k benchmarks are in though), however the current cores (regardless of bugfix) are good up to and including OGR-30. Apparently Optimal Golomb Rulers are useful up to 49 marks, so there's plenty more to look forward to. I have no information available yet on how the amount of work involved increases with each step (or how we as team were doing due to the current lack of stats), more on that as info becomes available. Due to the other projects' excitement RC5-64 progress was mentioned a while ago too: we are holding the 5^th overall spot and the keyspace checked stands at about 19.4%, or about 23 days a percent since the last check (at 15%), according to my rough calculations. That is holding a steady average, which is good considering two other simultaneous projects have been undertaken/going on/finished since then. The server move should occur around the end of this week and should proceed seamlessly, I'm keeping both servers up to date until a couple of days after the change so possible laggy DNS servers will not impede access. Lastly: my counter reached 200 thousand individual hits overall yesterday (since the effort start on 20-Aug-97), so hooray :) A couple of thousand of that at least is hits to my personal stuff since I didn't expect it to be such a success and thus start a separate count, but anyway :) I'll see if we can detect who will access around the 210K mark and perhaps treat him/her to a nice surprise :)
14-Feb-2000	Today the Optimal Golomb Rulers contest starts, since there is no Amiga client capable of OGR yet, we can't completely switch to it, but you could switch with any other machines if you wish. Let's help out on this one too and make the Amiga community look good once again! Make sure to upgrade to the latest clients, some problems were solved in the recent updates and of course OGR was added. Other news: finally put up the interview in the German amigaOS magazine, see the press section. Also localized all articles which are not available on the original sites anymore, and added pictures/logos to some. Finally: stats at Distributed Net are down for maintenance but will be back soon. Also, these pages will move to a new server soon, this means no change in accessibility (still same address, just other IP number), hopefully the transition (DNS change) will happen smoothly, but I mention it here, just in case. I hereby thank Mike ('DrWho') for hosting us for so long, thanks!
25-Jan-2000	From the D.Net .plan files: The CSC winner was Paul Ilardi, a grad student at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, USA. He looked through his local proxy logs and was able to determine that the winning machine was a Sparc Ultra 1 and he's even snapped a picture of the box. http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~pilardi/nano.jpg
16-Jan-2000	The CSC effort is over! After 62 days and about 98% of the keyspace checked the CSC key has been found, the secret message was: "CS-Cipher a ete presente en mars a Fast Software Encryption (PARIS)." The correct key was found by a Sparc box running Solaris in the US, more information on the winner and what team he/she belongs to to follow after Distributed Net gets consent to publicize it. The Amiga team ranked 5^th overall; with just over 4 million keyblocks of 2²⁸ keys each we did 1.11% of all work. See the final statistics. We now continue with RC5-64, which currently stands at about 17.5% of the keyspace checked. Work is also being done on an OGR capable client, stay tuned.
10-Jan-2000	Yesterday an announcement (to be found on the CSC overall stats page) was posted to further clarify the earlier explanation of why over 100% of CSC keyspace was listed on the D.Net stats pages: apparently due to an error in the master key server which occured some time ago and has even been fixed (albeit unknowingly) in the meantime, about a quarter of the issued keys was corrupt and will have to be redone. So we are back to around 80% of the keyspace, but at 3% a day this is only a minor setback. Also, everyone who flushed blocks in that period will receive credit for them anyway, so no work is lost. The effort should realistically be finished within a week from now, plus maybe a couple of days for verifying the winning key with CS-C and announcing the findings.
08-Jan-2000	Back from holidays, and found everything running, no Y2K worries with Amiga :) CSC has passed the 100% mark, but apparently due to the way stats are put together (extra checks, recycling) this only means that it can only be a matter of days now until the key is found. If you take part in the CSC contest, keep your buffer sizes low, this will prevent superfluous work due to recycling of the keyspace. A development team is forming in the meantime to update the Amiga clients, more news on this as things develop, I'm off to catch up with the rest of the news/mail now :)
20-Dec-99	Yesterday the CSC effort passed the 50% marker, and progresses with more than 2.5% of the keyspace a day now. This means that before the end of the year more than 75% of the keyspace would be done if the key is not found by then. Also, starting from the 23^rd yours truly will be on a holiday until the second week of January, so the webpage will not be updated in the meantime (team stats/new submissions/news). I guess this means the fact that we will regain 5^th position in RC5-64 shortly and the finish of the CSC contest will not be noted here until I return. So hereby I wish everyone a happy christmas and a wonderful new year, next millennium and all :)
14-Dec-99	The latest MMX enhanced CSC clients are out (build 448), anyone participating in CSC with a PC upgrade now, since it's about twice as fast! CSC incidentally is progressing faster and faster, already one third of the entire keyspace is done, with the new clients this will rapidly become a matter of weeks if not days, probably finished before the end of the year. We are also steadily catching up again with the Japanese FreeBSD team (almost 100K blocks a day), so staying with CSC for a little longer will not hurt, keep cracking! Some G4 news from the Mac team: the current beta looks promising with 5.8 Mkeys/s on a 450 MHz machine, so that looks promising too..
02-Dec-99	RC5 stats are back. It seems the Japanese FreeBSD team caught up with us again in the meantime (ten days?), although it beats me how, since we were ahead a couple of million blocks already last I looked, and have been widening the gap every day since (also for yesterday's anewed daily stats). So either this is a fluke of the stats rebuild, or they've had some impressive help in that period, since we didn't progress any slower. Either way, I guess we'll soon overtake them again, by the looks of it (assuming current stats are correct) within one month. In the meantime, CSC is going strong, and even though RC5 has kept up at almost regular levels we are currently ranked 4^th for CSC! Keep up the excellent work :) Also, CSC is progressing ever faster, now at over 15% done and almost 1.5% a day, so with any luck we will finish it before the end of the year. On a separate note: AltiVec supporting G4 cores for RC5 are in beta and benchmark already at ~4.5 Mkeys/s on a 400 MHz part. Cross your fingers for Amiga boards carrying one of these monsters to appear soon..
22-Nov-99	Also missed mentioning (except on the mailinglist) that the CSC effort has started (i.e. D.Net entered it now due to clients supporting CSC being late, it's been going since March). There are separate stats for this, linked from the RC5-64 stats pages. It looks like after a week we are doing fine (6^th overall) even though the majority of team members didn't switch (yet, maybe, but then again we are not losing any major ground in RC5 this way). Since this is going to be a semi-short contest (with any luck and depending on how many people switch, maybe one to two months) it might be a good idea to switch some machines over so we may have a chance at some fame and the prize money perhaps (which is 10k Euros in the usual 60/20/10/10 D.Net distribution). Especially since there is no CSC capable Amiga client yet those with more machines could run both CSC and RC5. Note: if you do participate in CSC, make sure you have the client's 446 build since 444 will fetch/flush but not be counted! First progress report: after one week 3% of the keyspace has been done, with speed ramping up to almost a percent a day, and probably more later.
12-Nov-99	Missed mentioning that we passed the 15% marker, apparently faster again at 22 days for the last percent, although the addition of missing blocks from a while back may have helped. Also a record day at 400 K blocks, let's hope this is due to the faster 68k core and keeps up :)
11-Nov-99	Some parts of the site were down yesterday due to the BOFH accidentally deleting a couple of homedirs :) But all is well now, the affected parts were concerned with member list submissions. I think I replaced everything, but if you see any broken links, please mail me.
07-Nov-99	Experimental beta with faster 68k core online. See the download section for specifics. Note that this is a BETA, with all kinds of problems, use it only if you really need the faster core.
26-Oct-99	Normally I don't include general news here, but this disquieting article on Slashdot is related to distributed computing efforts in so far as if the mentioned company succeeds we might not be able to throw any distributed computing at some of the problems distributed computing/brute force methods may be most suited to and possibly most worthwhile for. Not to mention the far reaching implications for the human race in general of companies owning our very basic makeup. Maybe at some point of the future you will not only be barred from a good education if you aren't well off, but your children may not be eligible for benefits of DNA technology, such as preventing or curing any illnesses they might suffer from.. "A British trust has warned Celera Genomics that data from Human DNA should remain in the public domain to maximize benefits for medical research. Celera is about to patent DNA structures after decoding about one third of the human genome. The Wellcome Trust is leading moves to stop the information becoming the private property of corporations." Celera has been brute-forcing structures, enabling them to beat The Human Genome Project to the punch - and are filing for 6000 patents. Please contact the Wellcome Trust to indicate your support of them. Patent attempts like Celera's stifle scientific progress. A similar article in The Washington Post.
22-Oct-99	The RC5-64 effort is now 2 years old. Although the Amiga situation (or that of encryption politics) has not improved a lot in the meantime (understatements-R-us), the team is still going strong, with a top 5 ranking, and getting faster. Perhaps a lot faster next year with G3/4 support. The overall effort has also progressed nicely, 4% of the keyspace done in the first year, another 10% in the second. At this kind of growth rate we'll do another 25% by the third year and finish before the fourth. By then we might even see a rebound in things Amiga. Until then, keep cracking! Update: Added press release on second anniversary to the press section.
17-Oct-99	The RC5-64 effort reached 14% of the keyspace yesterday, slightly faster at 24 days for this percent. Also, see the miscellaneous section for a downloadable version of the Myzar guide in German.
05-Oct-99	We finally caught up with the Japanese FreeBSD team and have retaken the 5^th position! The stats have also been back for a couple of days now, from this point on the movement in the top five should be very limited, unless we get more members and of course G4. So keep cracking :)
30-Sep-99	Distributed.Net stats are down due to maintenance (some problems with database size and speed), but for yesterday the effort first reached over 100 GKeys/s! (of which the Amiga team is responsible for about 1 Gkey/s) This means that at current rates we will reach 50% of the keyspace in 2 years time, but seeing how the effort has increased its speed over 10 fold between the first month after start and now (or over 200 times since the very beginning), this may be shortened to much less. I hope everyone is saving up for a G4 card to allow us to move up a couple of places before that :)
22-Sep-99	Day 700 of the RC5-64 effort. With almost 13% of the keyspace done we broke the 100 million block boundary! Unfortunately the Anandtech team also caught us, although that was not surprising seeing how they were doing twice as much lately. Within 3 weeks however we will take back 5^th position by catching up with the Japanese FreeBSD team. Soon after that we will hopefully enjoy the power of G4 PowerPCs, early estimates on AltiVec optimization put a 400 MHz part into the 3-5 Megakey/s (!) range, so we only need a couple of hundred upgrades to start moving towards the top :)
07-Sep-99	The German Myzar guide has been updated for version 2.0, see the miscellaneous section. Also added the July interview with AmiWorld to the press section.
29-Aug-99	Again one percent in 26 days, the effort has now searched 12% of all the keyspace. If the current rate doesn't change, we'll reach 50% at about 2.7 years from now.
03-Aug-99	The RC5-64 effort has passed the 11% marker in the keyspace. This took four days less than the previous percentile, or about 26 days, so the speed is picking up again. In the meanwhile Anandtech is closing rapidly on us (may well overtake us before we overtake the currently fourth ranked team..), so get cracking :)
02-Aug-99	Myzar 2.0 is out! See the miscellaneous section. Now offers a single interface to both the 68K and PPC clients, full control of all client settings, a graphical representation of log data and lots of new configuration and display options.
31-Jul-99	Interesting news: Jim Collas of Amiga expressed interest in the effort in a newsgroup message and promised to contact me, although it is too early to say, this could possibly help the effort a lot. More on this as things develop. Also dug up the thought to be lost 'The Lair' interview done back in 1997 and relinked it in the press section. Things don't always work out as you would like them, I'm still not on vacation, but maybe I can arrange one week at least, hopefully soon :)
21-Jul-99	Yesterday we passed the Japanese Linux team and thereby moved up into the 5^th overall position. Well done folks! :) It is interesting to note that we are advancing as fast on the 4^th position as we were on the 5^th (faster even than yesterday), and will get there in about three months at current differences (unless new/faster teams move ahead in the meantime). See the press release in the press section. (as you have noticed I'm not on holiday yet, but will be in the next day or two at most..)
07-Jul-99	The RC5-64 effort has reached the 10% mark, equally fast as the difference for the last step, probably due to holidays and some SETI conversion (or has kept up, in spite of). Also, I'm off for a vacation of three weeks starting next weekend, the mailinglist will keep running but new machine submissions and updates to daily statistics and the corporate page will be postponed. Mail is kept, just not read until I'm back, so if you have to say something urgently, do it now. I fully expect to see us passing the Japanese Linux team by the time I'm back, so keep cracking :)
28-Jun-99	Got a bit tired of waiting for the raw data to return at D.Net and hacked together a script that takes on the HTML (>500 KB of badly formatted data, which even changed while I was doing the script :), so the Corporate Hall of Fame is back! We are also still closing in on the fifth position, we will catch them hopefully before I go on vacation in less than two weeks time :)
14-Jun-99	Day 600! Progressing steady, looks like we need about two more months for catching up with the Japanese Linux team and move into the top 5. After that the hunt for fourth position (Japanese BSD team) is on, we are catching up with them almost as fast as with #5, but they are ahead some more. If we keep growing (which seems likely with the coming G3 cards) we might catch them by the second anniversary of the RC5-64 effort.
08-Jun-99	Yesterday the effort passed the 9% mark, another percent in one month exactly. There is no reliable data available on how SETI has influenced the overall RC5 rates (it seems to have stabilized the Amiga effort in the top 5 if nothing else), but if we get as lucky as with DES III and the present rate holds or grows we could be finished with RC5-64 by this time next year.
26-May-99	Added performance tuning section to the usage page with priority and timeslice settings, this should clear up any problems with low performance when using both PPC and 68k client (or maybe if you just moved from PowerUp to WarpOS).
23-May-99	Rüdiger Engel ('Granada'), member of Amiga Club im BTX & Internet has created a German manual including screenshots for the installation and setup of Myzar, available here.
20-May-99	Wolgang Czepan, member of Amiga Club im BTX & Internet has kindly translated the Myzar GUI manual to German, check it out.
13-May-99	The PPC RC5 client now also runs under WarpOS! Thanks to Frank Wille's ppclibemu the PowerUp client now also runs under WarpOS, check out his download page. If you were holding back due to the lack of a true WarpOS client or just switched to WarpOS then this is your chance to run the PPC client until a native WarpOS version appears.
08-May-99	We passed the 8% mark in the RC5-64 challenge yesterday. Average rates are now around 70 Gkeys/s as opposed to around 60 Gkeys/s for the last percent marker, so the effort is still getting faster. At current speeds this means if we get as lucky as for the last DES challenge (22.2% of keyspace searched until the right key was found), we are looking at about a year more for the RC5-64 effort..
06-May-99	Since the server hosting the GUI frontend Myzar is temporarily down it has been made available here as well for now, see the miscellaneous section. As an aside, we are steadily advancing on the Japanese Linux team, if current differences hold up (or improve :), we may take fifth position overall in the rankings in less than two months..
29-Apr-99	Today the effort has reached the 500 PPC equipped Amiga marker! This is still without any of the announced G3 boards even. See also the press release added to the press section.
25-Apr-99	The effort site (the pages you're reading now :) has been off the air for a couple of days due to the previous box being unexpectedly pulled, thanks to the generosity of DrWho providing us with a temporary server it's back again now. Also, we're nearing the 500 PPC equipped Amiga milestone (and closing in on 5^th position overall).
15-Apr-99	It is now finally possible to retire old E-mail addresses to a new one and move your blocks without losing stats! If your old E-mail is not active anymore and you forgot your password for it, mail help@distributed.net. Also, you can now hide behind an ID number or name instead of E-mail address in the D.Net statistics as well (we had anonymity options way before :). For now the member list on these pages will not change format since you can already be anonymous. A field with the D.Net ID number might be added later so lookups are possible on that too (similarly protected by an 'anonymous' checkbox you can tick on the submission form if you wish), but this requires some rewriting of various stuff so won't be added until statsbox II functionality is more or less complete and stable. The Corporate Hall of Fame will hopefully be updated soon as well, that part of the stats (raw data pages) is not back yet.
10-Apr-99	Back from the (all too short) vacation, everything is running at full steam again, if you have held back any mail fire away. We also passed the 7% marker in the meanwhile and you can now join the team again (i.e. attribute blocks). For now that's all you can do, a full overview page will be added later. For now you simply go to your own E-mail's page, use the link at the bottom to get a password if you didn't have one already, then go to the Amiga team's page, click on the 'I want to join this team' link there and enter your E-mail + password. This is only necessary if you previously attributed to another team or if you're new and didn't attribute any blocks to anyone yet. If you have your password handy simply click here for the one stop solution. Then enter your E-mail and your password and your blocks will be attributed to the Amiga team. You will get a confirmation page with previous (if any) and new team. Also updated the usage page with this info, read there for a more in depth explanation.
03-Apr-99	Starting today I will be off on a vacation for a week, service will resume next weekend. This means stats updates, member form submissions and E-mail will be addressed then (no mail is lost, just unread until then). The mailinglist (including subscriptions) will be down for that period as well, since I don't have proper spam protection in place yet.
25-Mar-99	The specific team statistics are once again back, expect gradual (re)addition of other functionality over the coming period. When team attribution and such will be possible again it will be announced here of course. As before, smaller changes are noted in Nugget's .plan. Also for the interested, preliminary information about the third generation of clients/network is available here. Finally, in a little over one week from now I'll be on a week long vacation (yeehaa :), expect mail not to be answered and submissions for machine info, updating the stats pages etc. will be dealt with once I'm back again.
07-Mar-99	The RC5-64 effort is now underway for 500 days! Although we are still at only about 6% of the keyspace the rate has increased dramatically since the start and there is plenty of room for improvement. 56 bit DES has been cracked several times in the meantime, going from being measured in months to hours, illustrating evolving technology and software. Who knows if the RC5-64 effort will be concluded within the next 500 days? Maybe we will have a chance to use Next Generation Amigas to improve our ranking still :) Keep cracking!
03-Mar-99	Today we passed the 6% mark in the RC5-64 keyspace, again taking a week less than for the previous percent mark (or about 15% faster), showing the increasing speed of the overall effort.
19-Feb-99	Statsbox II is now online (see webcam picture), with limited functionality, meaning that for the while only some basic top lists are accessible and the HTML is a bit ugly. This will gradually change as the new database system is tied in with the normal (and new) functionality and the representation is beautified. The main effort 4000 was down for two days due to partial PSU failure, after some hacking (read dynamite blasting) it's back up :)
10-Feb-99	A Russian catalog is now available for Myzar, check out the miscellaneous section. Statsbox II is being worked on, until then no stats, but it's ever closer to completion, keep cracking!
26-Jan-99	Unfortunately the stats box is not quite back yet, contrary to the previous news item, please be patient until the problems are resolved. This means that the team statistics can be accessed, but personal ones not yet.
23-Jan-99	The RC5-64 statistics are back, you can now access everything again. Let's move up to fifth, shall we? :) Oh, and we passed the 5% mark too now (3 to 4% took about three and a half months, 4 to 5% took one and a half).
22-Jan-99	Put up final Corporate Hall of Fame (see bottom for link) and member statistics pages for DES III. RC5-64 stats aren't back yet, this also means you can't access your personal stats for now (should not be long now). Hopefully statsbox-II (and the new features) will arrive shortly as well.
20-Jan-99	The final DES III statistics are in (will put them up as separate pages later), we ended ranked 11^th (with the obvious top dog being EFF's Deep Crack), thanks to everyone who participated. Some people asked what the use of testing DES 56 bit encryption is since it takes so little time now: aside from the numerous reasons listed elsewhere on these pages (read previous news for one), a quick and 'flashy' contest often refocuses attention and helps all efforts in the long run; aside from the award money (more resources towards infrastructure) and exposure points of view this is illustrated quite well by the RC5-64 keyrate which jumped ~10% compared to right before DES III. Other news: added Amiga Format 118 news article to press section.
19-Jan-99	We did it! DES III cracked in under 24 hours! Everyone a heartfelt thanks for participating, we will return to RC5-64 now. DES stats will come online later (first partial results placed the Amiga team as number 10, not bad :). Here's the full .plan from the D.Net server relating the story: It is with considerable excitement (and quite a bit of relief) that I can now announce that the DES-III contest is officially ended. At 07:15 am PST (14:15 UTC), just about the time when we all started getting worried about the 24-hour waypoint, the solution to DES-III arrived. The winning key, 92 2C 68 C4 7A EA DF F2, revealed the plaintext message: The unknown message is: See you in Rome (second AES conference, March 22-23, 1999 The winning key was found by EFF's Deep Crack hardware, and submitted to the distributed.net servers immediately. RSA confirmation of the success followed shortly thereafter. It's truly been a joy and a thrill to work with John Gilmore and the other talented and clued people at EFF. Were it not for their contributions to distributed.net, the 24-hour deadline would have been a much more difficult goal to reach. I'll be running stats for the partial 19-Jan work up to the point of success and posting them this afternoon for the archives. More details will follow soon as the dust settles, RSA is planning a 12:00 noon PST announcement at the RSA '99 Convention. Both John Gilmore and our own Peter Gildea will be in attendance. Here's a few statistics on our aggregate success: Start of contest: January 18, 1999 at 09:00 PST End of contest: January 19, 1999 at 07:15 PST Elapsed Time: 22 hours 15 minutes Percentage Complete: 22.2% Size of keyspace: 72,057,594,037,927,936 Keys Tested: 16,017,142,616,948,736 Blocks Tested: 29,834,253 Overall Keyrate: 199 Gkeys/sec Peak Keyrate: 250 Gkeys/sec
18-Jan-99	DES III is on! Follow live stats updates at http://www.distributed.net/des/rsa_body.html. Just two hours into the contest and we're doing 140+ Gkeys/s already :)
17-Jan-99	Added press release for the DES III challenge starting Monday, January 18^th 1999. Other news: we have not passed the 6% mark for RC5-64 yet as stated earlier, this was an error of the stats machine. Another small speedup for CPUs with MMX (4%) for some clients regarding DES, get them now before the DES III challenge starts (Monday).
16-Jan-99	Myzar (the GUI frontend) has been updated to v1.2, see the miscellaneous section for full details. Also see there for the addition of some new icons and a nice dock image.
15-Jan-99	The second DES III test has been completed (the key was not returned on time for the 56 hour limit, although it was assigned a few hours before the deadline). The peak rate was a steady 100 Gkeys/s (plus another 88 Gkeys/s when EFF joins Monday). The real DES III contest starts Monday at 17:00 UTC and also will be limited to 56 hours (since there is no prize money after that), so please everyone, upgrade your (non-Amiga) clients to the latest ones (http link, in case this fails ftp link) which boost DES performance by a wide margin again (if you have MMX, this goes for Pentium II's and K6-2's too!). There will be DES stats, so please everyone switch to it, we have another opportunity at major exposure here! (not to mention the prize money :) Also, lower your buffer settings for DES to the absolute minimum, buffering hundreds of blocks can be lethal to this contest. The stats box is still a bit out of it, but we have in the mean time passed the 6% mark in RC5 keyspace. If you experience network trouble, some of the proxies have had problems, try a different proxy if you cannot connect (especially important for quick flushing during the DES III contest). See the proxy listing at Distributed.Net for alternatives.
12-Jan-99	The second DES III test run is now underway (this one is limited to exactly 56 hours).
10-Jan-99	The finder of the first DES III test run key was Daniel Preston (not a member of the Amiga team).
09-Jan-99	The key to the DES III test run has been found after 59 hours (by a PowerMac, no other details at the moment), check out the full story. A second test run (dubbed DES-test-2) will be undertaken which is limited to 56 hours to simulate a time limited contest such as DES III will be. The second run commences on January 12^th and stops after 56 hours whether the test key is found or not. If you have DES buffers left, please delete them, no other changes are necessary (except maybe updating to new clients which appeared or will appear soon).
05-Jan-99	DES III test run is now on its way.
03-Jan-99	The DES III test run has been delayed until at least Tuesday (the fifth) if you were wondering, also stats box is in some minor trouble so keyrates shown are lower than they actually are, this is expected to be fixed soon.
02-Jan-99	Happy new year to everyone! Client news: new clients for some platforms are available at the D.Net ftp site, with improved DES performance (MMX), get them now. The test run for DES III starts at 17:00 UTC (GMT) on January 3^rd, if you want to evaluate the clients. The real DES III challenge commences on January 18^th (also 17:00 UTC).
29-Dec-98	DES III news: EFF will apparently join forces with D.Net for DES III, so the chances of us doing useless work are gone. This does however mean that the solution will arrive even sooner, so a quick flush of cracked blocks will be absolutely essential. On that front however see the latest client news in the D.Net finger gateway shorts, a quickstart feature and new improved (faster) MMX clients will hopefully make it on time (Amiga info pending as well, news soon I hope). Lastly: now over 3000 machines are in the Amiga effort alone!
22-Dec-98	Important DES challenge news (from David McNett of Distributed Net): Just to avoid any undue confusion, it looks as if RSA Labs has re-badged the upcoming DES-II-3 challenge as "DES-III" and re-structured the time frames for the three levels of win. To grab the full US$10,000 we will need to submit the winning key within 24 hours of the contest start. Failing that, we'll collect US$5,000 if we're within 48 hours. Waiting until 56 hours yields only US$1,000 and beyond that it's purely academic. Contest is scheduled to begin at 09:00 PST on 18-Jan-1999. This means that we will have a bit more time than originally planned to find the right key (originally 14 hours for the $10k prize), and 5 days more before the challenge starts. This probably also means that the test run scheduled to start on January 2^nd for DES is extended up to the new date of start. (all clients set to also do DES will switch to DES on January 2^nd for a test run). If you do not want to participate in the test run (the blocks from January 2^nd to the 18^th will not count, so we'll lose RC5-64 progress if you let it run DES from the second), switch to RC5-64 only, but remember to switch back to DES in time for the contest of course, we have another real chance at cracking that one. It's very important that you set the client to flush as soon as possible for the DES III challenge, preferably by using a small buffer threshold like 2:1 (the threshold2 line in the ini file). Other news: amazingly still a number of T-shirts left, come on people! Mail me (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word) ASAP about ordering if you thought you were too late, or send the money now if you already have the details! The stats box is back from a week long absence, our rate for yesterday (1.45 Gigakeys/s) is a bit high as you can see :) And of course merry christmas to all of you, and a happy new year!
06-Dec-98	During today the effort passes the 4% mark. Still plenty of RC5-64 keyspace to do (interrupted by the probably very short DES II-3 on January 13^th), more members (1600 as of yesterday!) are most welcome. Also still some T-shirts left, if you have inquired but not sent money yet, do it ASAP, all shirts must go! It will take some time before new ones are available, so this can be considered the 'collector's edition' :)
30-Nov-98	Myzar, the GUI frontend for RC5/DES clients has been updated to v1.11, check out the miscellanous section for a description of the changes and where to download it.
26-Nov-98	As of today as many queries have come in as there are T-shirts left, which means a deadline on payment has to be established so others who are willing to buy one do not have to be disappointed. Those who have ordered are recommended to send the money now (snail mail lag in holiday season!), after 04-Dec-98 the shirts will go out on a first come first serve basis. Of course anything received after all shirts are sent out will be refunded. This means that those people who want one but haven't ordered yet should mail me (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word) ASAP. After this batch is sold out I will try to have a larger batch of the elaborate design done, but this will take some time (i.e. until I have the capital to invest/a regular income). Other news: the stats server is back since a number of days; D.Net is close to revealing Statsbox II for faster statistics and a new system which adds a participant ID number which lets you move blocks from old E-mail addresses and adds a measure of anonymity (i.e. you can use the ID number instead of your real E-mail address in the stats). When this is all in place and working, and a suitable period has passed to give everyone a chance to change if they want, a ranking within the member list may be added, or possibly the now private member list may be opened.
19-Nov-98	If you have mailed an order and used the link in the last news item, please resend, the address was incomplete (missing .nl at the end) and is of course rc5(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word). Thanks to Peter Strömberg for pointing it out.
17-Nov-98	Back from the Cologne show, and a pretty eventful one it was too. Amiga Inc. announced new kernel partner QNX Software Systems Ltd. and showed an impressive demo of the QNX GUI 'Photon'. The realtime microkernel 'Neutrino' will serve as the base for the Amiga APIs. For more info and show reports see the Amiga.org news section, a demo of Photon including fully functional browser, web server and some goodies that fit on one 1.44 MB floppy (!) are available for download at the QNX site. T-shirt news: 17 of the 30 were sold at the show, if you were not able to attend and want one, please order by mail (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word). There are now 10 shirts left (sizes L, XL and XXL), cost is 20 DM (+ p&p) or equivalent in other currency (NLG, USD or DEM). Please ask in mail for details and exact cost for your region. For some crude webcam shots of front and back, see below. A heartfelt thanks must go to the people of Amiga-Club im BTX & Internet for their hospitality, helping out greatly with the T-shirts, getting my 4000 to run after the PSU temporarily failed, getting a room in spite of the hotel being overbooked and a good time in general. Visit their site for pictures and reports of the event. Amusing anecdotes: Cologne taxi drivers apparently are scared of taking three guys after midnight, 3 out of 4 taxis turned their lights off at the moment we flagged them. My Amiga brought along to demonstrate RC5, Myzar, the website etc. (after it was magically fixed by the AC guys) was requisitioned by Darreck Lisle of AInc. to serve as a gateway in the IRC corner of the AI booth and I ended up moderating some conferences and sort of keeping the webcam running amongst others. Talked to a lot of people but due to having to watch my machine closely (apparently two other machines at the AI booth got their RDBs wiped) I couldn't move about a lot. A first: two people actually asked me for an autograph! :) On Saturday I fell asleep in the tub and made it to bed somewhere between 4 and 5 in the morning due to a late night drink/chat with the Amiga Club people (Zop, where were you for the Monday civ session? :), so I was glad to get back on Sunday evening and relax my feet, which were pretty much killing me by then. Other news: The stats server is back and we almost caught Slashdot yesterday, keep up the good work! :) Some pictures were made and some of these will be available when ready, although there are a lot on the web in various places already (see the AC site, Amiga.org and AWD). Some of you might be wondering what I look like, check the guy out on the left in this picture (courtesy of the Amiga Club im BTX & Internet). The webcam 'shirt' mugs: Back · Front
11-Nov-98	The Amiga RC5 Team Effort has a new address! distributed.amiga.org is easier to remember and shorter to type, not to mention cool :) Many thanks to the dedicated people at Amiga.org, check it out! Please update your bookmarks and tell me (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word) of any broken links. Mailinglist and E-mail addresses remain the same. T-shirt and Cologne '98 show news: yes, there will be T-shirts! Just in time for the show we managed to get them ready, see the T-shirt gallery for details. Also, yours truly will be present for the whole weekend (starting Friday the 13^th muhahahah :) at the show, if all goes well with a demonstration machine and selling the T-shirts. Visit me at the Amiga-Club im BTX & Internet booth, Hall 11.2, stand C36 (large fairground map from the Computer '98 site) The stats server is still off-line, Corporate Hall of Fame for example has not been updated for a while now due to this, the good people at Distributed.Net are working on it, keep cracking!
30-Oct-98	The stats server is partially off-line since a couple of days due to having reached the 32 bit block limit, this is being worked on, no work is lost. To keep up to date on such things, have a look at the finger gateway.
26-Oct-98 (update)	Added T-shirt design gallery with a form below where you can rate them to your liking.
26-Oct-98	T-shirt survey is now closed, here are the results, with a conclusion added below. A gallery of designs will be added real soon, and time is drawing short, so if you have any ideas or designs to submit, this is your last chance.
22-Oct-98	Complete site revamp! Being between jobs has the advantage of having some free time, I hope you like the result. If you do and happen to have a paid web project waiting for someone to tackle, your mail is welcome :) (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word) Although the structures have been checked thoroughly, please notify me of any broken links or other problems you might experience.
12-Oct-98	Added T-shirt survey page (removed 26-Oct-98), please submit your preferences ASAP so we can gauge interest for an Amiga RC5 Team Effort T-shirt! The design deadline has passed as well and three designs have come in, download the archive here to see. New designs, ideas and slogans are of course still most welcome!
09-Oct-98	John Girvin has collected a couple of 8SVX 'Moo' samples for use in Myzar, download the LZX archive. While you're at it, check out his core optimization pages for RC5-64 and DES. John will be officially joining Stefan in the current 'Amiga client programmer team' shortly. If you have trouble with the D.Net 'mail me a password' link, you're right, it's broken and will be fixed ASAP. Check out the D.Net finger gateway for the latest info on this kind of thing.
06-Oct-98	If you have downloaded Myzar v1.1, please download it again (see miscellaneous section), some debug code was left in the first upload. Also Finnish catalog is now included in the archive.
04-Oct-98	Myzar has been updated to v1.1, now localized and with a stats window, check out the miscellaneous section. Also, D.Net now sport a handy finger to web interface, various programmers and Bovine people have small updates there which do not warrant a full blown PR. Only two designs have reached us for the T-shirt as yet, be creative and earn some fame, send your ideas/designs to rc5(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl! (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word)
28-Sep-98	Another handy util for analyzing logfiles, this time by Jacek Rzeuski has been added to the miscellaneous section. Also a note on the small number of blocks for Sep-22 (concerned all teams), the old stats server ran out of storage on that day (now replaced), but no worry, nothing is lost, those blocks will be re-injected soon.
25-Sep-98	Time to celebrate once again: today (nearly yesterday by a hair's breadth) we moved up into the sixth position, leaving the LinuxNet team behind us. That means there are only five teams who have contributed more to the Distributed Net effort than the Amiga, and that out of thousands of teams! While this position may not change for quite a while, we are still growing and November tidings are drawing ever nearer.. Of course our main objective of exposure is being served, and how! Other news: Myzar is being localized as we speak, v1.1 should be out soon. We need your ideas/design/whatever for the T-shirt, to this end a deadline of October 7^th has been decided on, so send everything you come up with before that to rc5(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word).
19-Sep-98	It has been a while since the last update, so news has been pooling up nicely: While still only in the planning stages, a couple of things deserve mention: two invitations to Amiga shows have reached us, one for the Infomedia '98 show in Antwerp, Belgium (October 3-4^th) and one for the Computer '98 show in Cologne, Germany (November 13-15^th). Both would be tremendous opportunities to promote the effort and meet people involved, interested or just members of the unsuspecting public :). Unfortunately financial commitments may keep me from attending the first one, so volunteers are needed to man the space offered (even if I can there has to be at least one other person so a demo machine doesn't have to be left alone), promote the effort etc., otherwise the opportunity goes to waste.. For the November Cologne show the organizing Amiga-Club also kindly requests donations as they have to raise enough money to let us take some of their space in the first place :) For more info or offers on both, mail rc5(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word). Also planned are must-have-cool T-shirts which should be on sale by Cologne at least, please send any ideas or designs again to rc5(at)amiga.REMOVETHIS.xs4all.nl (obscured to thwart spambots, replace the at with @ and remove the capitalized word). Distributed Net have decided on adding Optimal Golomb Rulers (or OGR for short, look here for explanation) to the two ongoing challenges as they are working towards the third generation of distributed clients. It will be some more time before actual clients arrive, more on this later. Other news: new Myzar frontend is being worked on, as well as (still) new clients. Over 300 PPC equipped Amigas and more than 2500 machines in total are participating now with regular rates over 400 Mkeys/s and we are very close to overtaking the LinuxNet team :)
28-Aug-98	Myzar, the GUI frontend has been updated, check out the Miscellaneous section for the changes and where to download.
23-Aug-98 (update)	Finally added PR on the first anniversary in the press section, time to bombard the media! :)
23-Aug-98	The second percent of the keyspace has been searched. Whereas the first percent took seven months, the second one took only three, illustrating the growth of the overall effort (which is still way ahead of Moore's Law). Continuing at this rate we will have done 3% in about 2 more months and getting similar growth rates further on. Although it's still too early to speculate on whether growth rates keep up, or will possibly increase, methods based on linear growth calculation predict that we will have found the right key during the year 2000 or 2001. Also for yesterday we ranked third overall with an impressive 453 Mkeys/s, doing nearly twice as much blocks as LinuxNet, whom we should catch before the 3% mark :)
21-Aug-98	Three hoorays for Justin Pope and the Amiga community spirit! He kindly donated a replacement drive (3.5 GB IDE) after the main 'effort HD' started dying last week. A nice effort birthday gift :) Today we also broke the 400 Mkey/s barrier and ranked 5^th daily with that, way to go team!
20-Aug-98	Today The Amiga RC5 Team effort is celebrating its first anniversary! We started off after a 'cool, let's do this' session on IRC with a couple of machines and look where that got us <G>. A Press Release will go out shortly on this, spread the word! This is also an excellent time to alert mainstream media and hopefully get a mention of the Amiga and how things _can_ boom on a supposedly dead platform if the enthousiasm is there.. Note on the mail flushing mechanism (most people use the client to flush, ignore this bit unless you can only use E-mail to fetch/flush): the engine has been revised/rewritten, not all functionality has been reimplemented yet but it should be a lot faster now. It can currently only handle MIME attached base64 encoded buffer files (apart from this restriction, see explanation for this mechanism)
03-Aug-98	Roberto Patriarca has updated the Myzar GUI (now also for 2.7100.405 as well as newer, faster refresh, supports PPC and AmiTCP/Miami and many more). Get it!. Small update on the rankings: we have consistently been doing over 300 Mkeys/s (with now more than 20% PPC equipped Amigas), which means in time we will catch LinuxNet and move back up to 6^th. At current rates that's still more than 3 months though, which means we are still growing but we could do that faster :) So aga