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