Well, the distributed.net project finally cracked RC5-64, using brute-force keyspace searching. While this is, in itself, mildly interesting, what's really made me notice is the after-effects.
You see, the key was originally found in July but, because there are a number of obnoxious people out there filing massive faked "key found" notices to the system, it wasn't noticed until August, and because of scheduling issues with RSA labs, the announcement didn't happen until today. But that's not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that the d.net folks decided to clear out all the stats for packets sent after the winning packet was received. And the aftermath of that decision.
The project keeps stats, updated daily, and puts them up for viewing. There are teams, and you can get stats on daily and overall rankings by individual and team, there are mildly pretty graphs, and people use it for ego-wanking. And, like anything else people stroke their egos to, there was (and probably still is) a fair amount of furor over the decision to trash all the packet numbers after the winning packet was received. And there's also a lot of furor over the furor--the people who don't understand why people are upset.
The group dynamics are the important part. You've got the people participating for the ultimate reason behind the contest--to break the encryption and prove something or other. (Personally I moved over to OGR ages ago, as I find that's an actually useful thing to do, though the project has problems) But you also have the people in it purely for the ego boost having Big Numbers gives you. And neither side understands the other, or at least the vocal ones don't.
There's a lesson to be learned in all this, of course
Posted by Dan at September 27, 2002 12:24 PM