Official List Announcement
January 15, 1999

Greetings from distributed.net!

 Our DES-TEST-2 was a successful failure, in that we didn't find the key
 within the 56 hour time frame, but we were able to fully test the
 functionality of the clients and proxies.  It turns out that the key was
 assigned a few hours before the contest closed, but wasn't returned in 
 time for a "win."  A sincere thanks to everyone who had their client
 participate in the contest.

 Now, the big topic. DES Challenge III.  DES-III begins at 09:00:00PST/
 17:00:00UTC on 99-01-18 which is just next Monday..  We have 56 hours to
 find the key.  While this may sound difficult, since we didn't find it
 in our second test, keep in mind that there are lots of other elements
 that will allow us to speed up between now and then.  One of the major
 factors is EFF's Deep Crack.  It's now official, this custom made DES
 cracking machine will be checking keys for distributed.net at the rate
 of 88Gkey/s.

 Many of you have expressed concern to me about having your clients
 crunch DES since you won't get ahead in RC5 stats.  First of all, I would
 like to remind you that DES-III is very important to distributed.net. 
 This is our chance to show that large scale Internet distributed computing
 can be used for short term contests such as this one.  We will be hosting
 DES-III statistics, so don't worry about not having stats throughout
 the contest. ]:8)  At most, this is just 56 hours of your cracking
 time, so we would appreciate it very much if you could put RC5 aside
 on Monday and check DES keys.

 Please take the time and upgrade your clients to the latest v2.7105
 clients available on ftp://ftp.distributed.net/pub/dcti/v2.7105/ and
 http://www.distributed.net/clients.html.  For those of you who
 haven't upgraded recently, the newer v2.710x clients have DES quick-start
 code which allows clients to start cracking DES shortly after the
 contest begins instead of having to wait for the clients to automatically
 flush/fetch blocks.  Also, v2.7105 contains Bruce Ford's new DES MMX
 cores.  For those of you with x86 MMX processors, you will see a huge
 speed increase.  I highly recommend you upgrade and be sure you have
 DES enabled in your client configuration.

 Please be careful about buffers during this contest.  We need
 quick turnaround with blocks for this contest, so don't keep hundreds
 or thousands of blocks buffered.  A setting of 5:5 would be perfect
 for the average online client.  Personal proxies tend to minimally
 buffer about 500 blocks, so please don't run a pproxy unless your
 situation demands that you do.

 Thanks again to everyone running the client and to everyone who has been 
 burning the midnight fuel to get this off the ground.  Feel free to
 join us in our IRC channel (efnet: #distributed) on Monday to 
 watch this take off.

 Good Luck!

Daniel Baker dbaker@distributed.net