Official List Announcement
February 23, 1998

Greetings, and congratulations to everyone, root beer for all...

* [Archive: Feb 22nd, 1998 - Evening]
*
* OK, someone has stolen our beloved Monarch...
* If the see the below pictured Monarch, please report it immediately!
*
*   //\         /\\
*  || * \ . . / * ||
*   \\____\X/____//
*    / *  /O\  * \
*    \__/  "  \__/

2 down, N to go :)

* [Archive: Feb 24th, 1998]
*
* WHEW! Crisis averted... well... not really...
* Our beloved mascot left a note saying she has found a big hunk
* butterfly and has run off with him... this isn't good... she tripped
* over the stats server on her way out.

The stats server is down. We will be posting final standing at some
late time. We're also working on processing the RC5 logs since DES
started, so RC5 stats shall return when they are ready.

* [Archive: Feb 25th, 1998]
*
* Well, I found a bunch of eggs on one of my plants today, a gift from
* our mascot no doubt. I can't wait for the caterpillars to come out
* in the summer. Hmmm, a note... "Please do not disturb until July 13th"

The Monarch shall return to claim the prize again in 4.5 months.
By then v3 should be in place and we should be able to switch over
all available power in no time :)

* [Archive: Feb 25th, 1998]
*
* Well, as nature has it, Monarchs die soon after mating (bummer) - it
* seems the master server is refusing to hand out DES data anymore.
* It keeps spitting out "Crack RC5-64!!!" over and over again...
* luckily our clients are well equipped for this situation...

Don't touch those clients! they should switch automatically over to
RC5-64 as soon as they go looking for more blocks. Check on them in
a day or two to be sure.

-----------

This represents the second great victory for distributed.net
Back in the days when RC5-56 was projected to take over 200 years, it
was hard to believe we would ever finish, but we recruited, and
improved the clients (v2.0 back in those days), and found the magic
key.

Then we heard about DES-II, and we scrambled to get dual-mode clients
ready for that, keeping mind that it shouldn't take long. Little did
we know that the key would end up being near the end.

Now we're back to working on RC5-64, and the task seems impossible,
but it's already going to take less time than we thought RC5-56
would take when that project was just starting.  In the next several
months we'll recruit more people tune the clients a little more, and
keep improving out keyrate exponentially.

As we push onward, I will continue to develop the v3 specifications,
and by the time DES-II-2 comes along we should have v3 clients out
and ready to switch back over to DES.  I think we'll even amaze
ourselves.

  Adam L. Beberg
  beberg@distributed.net
  distributed.net founder
  http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/