One opened, more to go... Operation Clambake present:

The World's Fastest Computer



What would you say if I told you that you're currently sitting in front of the world's fastest computer? Well, that's just what I'm going to tell you. Not only that, but following these simple instructions you, too, can play with it. Better yet, the effort goes into a worthy cause, and if you get very lucky, there may be some money in it for you too. The best news is it doesn't cost a thing and takes only ten minutes of your time.

RSA Laboratories, a division of RSA Data Security

Sounds too good to be true? Or another MLM scheme? Well, it is true and as for the rest, let you be the judge of that. RSA Laboratories, a leading computer security and encryption research company is interested in testing the strength of different encryption methods against attacks. For this end, they're regularily putting out challenges to test different encryption methods.

The Fastest Computer on Earth - All Things Distributed

There's a prize set on finding the right key to unlock the secret message. Unfortunately, testing every single key possible against the encrypted message would require a couple of supercomputers at least and years to go. Enter distributed.net. The Bovine RC5 Effort hosted on distributed.net has written high-speed clients to automatically test keys against the secret message with no human intervention, and built the infrastructure to coordinate the effort by use of central computers distributing the work to the tens of thousands computers working on the problem.

Bovine RC5 Effort

That's where YOUR computer enters the picture and can make a difference. The clients are written in a way that lets it take advantage of the idle cycles of your computer when it's not doing anything. For most people, their computer is only working in response to their key presses and mouse movements, and the computer does nothing between these peaks of high activity. So the client does not slow down your computer, but lets you take full advantage of the processing power that would otherwise be wasted.

Operation Clambake

Now it's your change to make a difference. By joining The Bovine RC5 Effort you can help developement and research of distributed computing and cryptography, show the world the importance of strong encryption, the power of the Internet and help publicize the Clambake website. And that's not all, there's $1000 prize waiting the lucky finder of the correct key! distributed.net occasionally arranges other distributed computing efforts using their existing framework. Join now to get a head-start!

To start, you will need the distributed.net RC5DES client. You may also need the WinZip file extraction utility if you download the .zip version of the Windows client. While the files are loading, read forward.

Once the client has been downloaded, you will have to extract it into a directory of your choice. You should end up with the actual client program and a couple of documents. You may read thru them if you wish, but the set-up is rather straight-forward and starts as soon as you run the program.

Most of the configuration entries won't make sense at first, but luckily the defaults will do for everything except the "Email to report as". This is the e-mail address your client will report to the distributed.net network when it exchanges processing status information. It will also be used to contact you in case you find the correct key, so make sure it's correct! Read the documentation to find the meaning of the other parameters if you're interested in them.

Next you will need to start the client itself. With the NT rc5dessrc.exe version this will require you to run the program with the -install parameter. With the console-version you will need to add the client into your Startup-folder to have it start automatically. The GUI client will offer this option automatically in config. On *nix machines you may want to add /root/rc5des/rc5des > /dev/null & or equivalent to your system startup-scripts.

Xenu, ruler of the Universe

The bulk of the work is now done. However, if you wish to contribute the blocks of keys you check for Clambake's advantage, there still remains one little step to do. However, due to technical limitations of distributed.net you can't do this until it's nightly database run has been done and your information added to the statistics. So bookmark this page now and return here when you have time a day or two later.

To contribute your effort to The Knights Of Xenu, fill your e-mail into the field below and press the button. Request your password to be mailed to you, and after a couple of minutes of waiting the password should arrive. Reload your summary page and fill the password in to change your participant information, and enter 3504 into the team-field. Change anything else you wish and submit the changes. Congratulations! You're now a member of The Knights Of Xenu, one of the most succesfull teams on distributed.net. If you have questions or need assistance, contact Tilman Hausherr.

  Search for email:
  

The Knights of Xenu thank you for your effort.


Brought to you by:
Operation Clambake