Official List Announcement,November 16, 1999

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Official List Announcement

November 16, 1999

Moo!

On behalf of distributed.net, I am pleased to announce that we have completed the development and testing phases of CSC (CS-Cipher Challenge). We are ready for a wide-scale release, deployment, and launch. On November 17th at 00:00GMT, we will release the latest RC5/DES/CSC clients (dnetc446) and proxies (v311). Although we are working towards ports for every platform, they will not all be ready immediately. Users can visit the CSC for more information at the contest start.

CSC is an encryption challenge that is organized by CS Communications and Systems. It was designed to last one year, beginning March 17, 1999. CS Communications and Systems wishes to demonstrate how weak a 56-bit key is against brute force attacks. Accordingly, distributed.net has taken on the challenge.

A 10,000 Euro prize is being offered to the winner. As usual, distributed.net plans to distribute the money in our 60/20/20 method. 60% of the prize goes to the most popular non-profit organization. 20% goes to the winner (or if the winner is on a team, 10% to the winner, and 10% to the team the winner is on), and 20% goes to distributed.net to cover expenses and further development.

I would like to thank the hundreds of people who participated in our CSC beta during the past week. The test ran quite smoothly, and the assistance provided by users proved invaluable as we weeded out the remaining bugs in the new client code.

The new clients will be at CSC so please download the latest release when they're released, and start cracking CSC. We can wrap this project up in no time at all, as long as we work together.

Thank you for your continued support! Daniel Baker <dbaker@distributed.net>