Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 00:25:15 -0300 From: madodel at ptdprolog.net Subject: [VOICENWS] Net: We need your spare CPU cycles for Team Warped From: "Kevin McCoy" All, Did you know that some dedicated OS/2ers have been competeing on your behalf for over 7 years, using our computers to solve some very difficult cryptographic and mathematic problems? Did you know that Team Warped is in the TOP 10 teams in the world in one of the contests! This is out of thousands of teams, so its quite an honor to be this high in the rankings! By our high rankings, we show the power of OS/2 to the world - even when we are vastly outnumbered by other operating systems. Team Warped (OS/2) is currently working on two distributed.net contests. The first one, called RC5-72 is attempting to crack a commonly used cryptographic algorithm. The second is a mathematic algortithm called OGR-25. By "cracking", I don't mean *anything illegal*. It is simply a test of what kind of computing power and time is required to figure out the "password" of a sentence encrypted using RC5 encryption. Everyone knows the text of the sentence. The hard part is trying out every possible password. There are more possible keys than stars in the sky, so it takes a while :-) It is the OGR-25 contest where we are in the top 10, so we would like to concentrate on that one. Team Warped members donate computer time using a simple utility that runs in the background on your Warp, eCS, windoze or Linux box. The utility periodically downloads new blocks of possible "passwords" (keys actually) and tries to decrypt the encrypted sentence or work on another block of mathematic problems. Since the utility only uses your CPU when it is not being used for other tasks, you will likely not know it is running. To stay in the top 10, we need your help! You can help by downloading the appropriate "client" or utility from: http://www.distributed.net/download/clients.php There are different clients for OS/2 (one client works on all OS/2 flavors) and other operating systems. Make sure you download the correct one. Team Warped can use your help *even if some of your machines use other operating systems*, but we do prefer OS/2 and its variants :-) Next, _join Team Warped_, so that we get credit for the work your computer(s) do. If you don't join, you aren't helping us in the rankings! You will need to configure your client - send me an email and I will walk you through the setup process. Its easy and only takes a few minutes. The best computers to use are ones that stay on day and night, like servers, firewall computers or ones you leave on all the time. I have 5 in my home that I leave on 24/7. The rest are computers I use at work. If you shut the monitor off, computers use surprisingly little power. We'll take any machine's work, even if it is only on for brief periods. If you would like to monitor your computer(s) progress in the contest, check out my automated statistics web site at: http://www.idk.serveftp.net:81/cowboy/participant.html Click the blue text to see graphs and other statistics - its quite extensive. (I wrote the stats robot and HTML generator myself, BTW). If you set up your client to send its log files to my site's robot, it will automatically analyze them and draw graphs of your computer(s) performance, your ranking against all other people in the world, and your team rank. You can view your stats from anywhere in the world and keep track of your computers health. The robot updates the stats graphs and text every 15-20 minutes, 24/7/365, so its always up to date. I provide the stats web site as a free service to other Team Warped members - there is *no* advertising and I do not collect *any* personal information. The best way to participate is to install the distributed.net client on as many machines as you have access to. I have it running on ~38 computers right now, but even your single computer can make a difference! Team Warped wants you!... well your computers free time anyway :-) Write me back personally or here on the list for more details. Did I mention there is a cash prize for the person that cracks RC5? The odds of winning are better in the Lotto, but what the heck - this is for the higher glory of OS/2. :-) Thanks for helping, Kevin McCoy (KeyRing/2 author) -- Warpstock 2005 - Where/When? Stay tuned to http://www.warpstock.org Warpstock Europe 2005 - Where/When? Stay tuned to http://www.warpstock.net [Moderator's note: All posts are sent without guarantee to the accuracy of the content. We try to verify details and URLs but this is an entirely volunteer run list, so 100% fact checking and the quality/useability of products announced here is impossible. 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