Also, you need the build 509 clients (v2.9103) to participate in the OGR-27 project, clients for all Amiga platforms are out on the pre-release page. Client build 507 (v2.9101) will simply exit thinking no more work can be done, so upgrade now. The Distributed Net release concerning the OGR-26 project's successful conclusion:

We've just confirmed receipt of the last OGR-26 stub, thus marking that project officially complete! We will try to publish who submitted the most optimal and last stubs, once we confirm that they don't mind their identities being revealed.

Due to variations in complexity, we expect that OGR-27 will take us significantly longer than OGR-26 did. It is difficult to provide a precise estimate but one extremely rough guess is about 7 years, assuming no increase in computing power and that our size estimation sampling reflects the entire stubspace.

There is one thing that is different with OGR-27 than with our previous OGR projects: we are confident that we will discover a better ruler for OGR-27 than the one we know to be optimal currently.

The Distributed Amiga team ended up 7^th out of 7912 teams, with 1.24% of all work done, an excellent result :)
For the whole course of the project our team consisted of 1103 members, of which the top placed individual Amiga team member was ranked 101^st out of 124,387 total project participants (with only two more days that would have been 100 exactly, oh well :).

From the distributed.net .plan announcements:

We have proven conclusively by the exhaustive search of all possible rulers
that the previously predicted 25-mark ruler is indeed the most optimal one.

The total length of the ruler is 480, with marks at positions: 0 12 29
39 72 91 146 157 160 161 166 191 207 214 258 290 316 354 372 394 396
431 459 467 480.  (This ruler may alternatively be expressed in terms
of the distance between those positions, which is how dnetc displays
them: 12-17-10-33-19-...)

This shortest ruler was found by two independent computers. The
initial report was received on October 10th, 2007 and a second,
matching result was returned on March 24th, 2008. However it was not
until the final stub was returned and verified that we could rule out
the possibility of a still-shorter ruler. This final stub was returned
on October 24th, 2008 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).

At the same time, OGR-26 and new clients/proxies were announced:

New clients and proxies will be required to support the new project,
which we are calling "OGR-NG". The new clients will have version
2.9101.507 or higher. Clients with version numbers prior to this will
only be able to work on the RC5-72 project. Similarly, Personal Proxy
version 343 or higher is required. [..]

The OGR node rate for these new clients may appear to be slower than
those for the OGR-25p2 project. This isn't a cause for concern. The
effective search rate for the overall project is actually more
efficient as these new clients are using an improved algorithm. The
new algorithm is named FLEGE (Feiri-Levet Enhanced GARSP Engine). It
has been developed by Didier Levet and Michael Feiri over the course
of the past few months. We are especially grateful to them for this
Herculean effort. In technical terms, the number of elements in the
'choose lookup table' has been increased from 48K to 2M
elements. Although this will slightly increase the size of the dnetc
binary, this optimization will significantly reduce the number of
nodes that we have to search through, sometimes a node improvement of
ten-fold or more.

We estimate that OGR-26 will take much less time to complete than
OGR-25 and will probably be more similar to OGR-24, in terms of
computational effort. Beyond that, we're looking forward to OGR-27 and
OGR-28 because the current solutions to at least one of the two is
very likely not optimal. OGR-26 is on the way and must be done first
since higher-order rulers depend on the proven optimality of previous
ones.

On Friday, April 27, 2007, Grid.org announced it has completed its mission to demonstrate the viability and benefits of large-scale Internet-based grid computing, and will be retiring its famous efforts to support critical health research. Grid.org was the largest and most ambitious public interest grid venture ever attempted, and thanks to Grid.org and its millions of members, dozens of similar global grid projects have been able to catch on and succeed by following its footsteps.

Facts and Figures

• As of April 2007, Grid.org managed 3,732,696 global devices, with 1,340,913 registered members who contributed 210 years of CPU time daily
• Grid.org's top 5 teams have nearly 100,000 members combined
• Our top 5 all-time teams (by CPU hours contributed):
  • Team 2ch, created 4/5/2001 with over 40,000 years of CPU time donated
  • Easynews, created 2/2/2002 with over 27,000 years of CPU time donated
  • Team Discovery, created 4/5/2001 with nearly 4000 years of CPU time donated
  • Vulture Central II, created 4/3/2001 with over 3000 years of CPU time donated
  • Dutch Power Cows against cancer, created 4/3/2001 with over 3000 years of CPU time donated

For the final Distributed Amiga team statistics, see the effort stats page. Unfortunately team breakdown is no longer available, and I have no member list saved from this project. Nevertheless, thanks to all participants, you have helped research on a cure against cancer advance. It is unclear how the data compiled is going to be made available to the general public, hopefully more information will be provided through the United Devices website.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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)

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.

The actual finder of the key is not Distributed Net however, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF for short, a non-profit organization which is concerned with privacy and free speech issues on the Internet, amongst others.

They built a special 'DES cracker' for about $250,000 which cracked DES II-2 in 56 hours, or almost 2.5 days. In the same period of time the Distributed Net effort we participate in did somewhere in the region of 10-15% of that same keyspace and currently equals the 'Deep Crack' machine's power, while still 40% of the machines in the effort were doing RC5-64. Distributed Net's power is expected to grow to 2.6 times to that of 'Deep Crack' by the time DES II-3 starts, the next installment of RSA Labs' series of challenges. (The Bovine effort lasted 4 days total because they waited for confirmation of RSA Labs that the EFF found key was indeed the correct one.)

What does this mean? A well done to EFF for showing a relatively small non-profit can embarrass the US government in only 2,5 days (who contended for years that it would take multi million Dollar investments and months to do it), the same to Distributed Net for doing almost the same with just enthousiasm and spare cycles, and to us, the Amiga team for ranking this high in spite of everyone around us dressing black and holding their noses :)

Also, some well deserved exposure for the team and Amiga in general, and a little regret for not having found the key ourselves (or getting more time, since we looked to overtake Linux team as well, in addition of the Win32 team, perhaps even reaching the magical one Gigakey/s limit :)

What next? We continue with RC5-64 of course, where we are ranked 6th overall out of more than 3000 teams. You don't have to do anything special for this, the client v2.7100 switches back to RC5-64 automatically when it connects again to one of the Bovine proxies. Please delete any DES blocks you still have buffered as those are landfill now, and switch clients back to RC5-64 in case they didn't by themselves.

• The full EFF DES Cracker details and press release
• Distributed Net's press release

A direction which takes the necessary leaps to bring back the Amiga to where it belongs: at the forefront of computing. Future plans include a developmental bridge system with AmigaOS 4.0 due in November this year and the 'real' Amiga slated for 4Q99, running a new kernel and AmigaOS 5.0 (a very interesting, but probably fake mock-up of this system can be found here (found on the CGFX pages)). Major strategic partners are to be announced in the coming weeks.

Also, a 'superchip' to be announced which should be available starting 1Q99 has been chosen for the next generation Amiga, supposedly 5-10 times faster than current high-end Pentium systems. Programmable, scalable, multimedial heavenry, to twist some words into a description.

Rumours of phase 5 and H&P settling their dispute (perhaps helped by the scare of the initial announcement of an x86 compatible developer environment instead of PPC) arrived shortly after the show, with talks between p5 and AInc. reportedly having top priority. We may well see some changes to the bridge plan there..

While much remains to be clarified, for the first time since years the conditions exist to meet the expectations raised. Although AmigaOS 3.5 as an interim upgrade for existing 68k users has been dropped, the days of the 'classic' AmigaOS are not over, as it will continue to exist for the bridge system in hardware and in emulation for the NG Amiga. The NG AmigaOS should also be portable and open for licensing, which opens enough possibilities for any architecture besides or in conjunction with the 'superchip'.

Taking all into account, I can only say that I am pleased with events finally happening and development being set in motion again. As for the Amiga RC5 Team Effort, we continue with renewed vigour, hopefully with some new clients for our new toys to be added when the time is ripe :)

The future holds an increase in these numbers and consequently in our ranking. While the top ranked team is still 4-5 times faster, they are obviously much better equipped than our community effort, in various ways obvious to anyone who stuck it out with the Amiga over the past few years. This might however change with our new parents, as the World of Amiga show in London approaches (May 16-17), and plans for the future are expected to be unveiled.

Current expectations for the duration of the effort range from 2,5 years to 10 years for checking 50% of the keyspace, depending on lineair or exponential growth of the effort and computing power in general. While we may get lucky and find the right key before the year 2000, Amiga owners need not worry, the AmigaOS is Milennium proof. All that aside, 68k and PPC clients are being worked on, so keep cracking and stay tuned!

We now return to RC5-64 (stats will be available when backlog clears) and work continues on the third generation of clients allowing other challenges on a 'plug-in' basis.