Philip Ayres said:
.... the current copy of New Scientist ?
A friend of mine said that they're letter column makes referance to a group
of formerly RHBNC based hackers ....
For some reason my mind instantly was drawn to certain ex members of the
society...
Anyone seen the article and know what it said ?
Assuming it's the one I think it is, it's got a comment at:
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980815/letters6.html
If you follow the "Prof Challis" link at the end, it mentions "Egham
Hills 90210 Talker", which is run by some ex-RHBNC graduates,
specifically myself and piers. Egham Hills (and thus RHBNC) probably
got a better mention in the actual article itself, I don't know...
Hackers... hmm... the whole article is talking about cracking the rc5
encryption challenge, which isn't exactly hacking AS SUCH... it's an
encryption algorythm which is hard to decrypt using todays technology
unless you know the password. The only realistic way to do it at the
moment is to try each and every password out of a possible 2^64, which
is approximately 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible passwords to
try. To prove how difficult it is, the designers have offered
something like a $10,000 prize to the first person to decrypt one
particular encrypted message that they've published.
There's this group called distributed.net who publish software whereby
loads of people run the software and check a few million passwords at
a time each, without duplicating each other's effort. The theory is,
distributed.net then take some of the prize money for coordinating the
effort, some of it goes to a designated charity, some of it goes to
THE person who found the right password, and some of it goes to their
team. distributed.net then publish charts showing how many blocks of
passwords each team has tried, and basically Egham Hills (IE myself,
Piers, and loads of our online-friends) have checked more than any
other UK-based team.
So "hackers"... hmm... yeah, you could call us that, but it's all 100%
legal and above-board... We're just trying to win a share of $10,000
prize-money for (if you insist) "hacking" this thing that the
inventors have asked people to try hacking.
If you want to join our team, by the way, go to
http://www.distributed.net/clients and download a client for your
machine. The first time you run it, it'll give you a configuration
menu. Stick your email address in, and configure anything else you may
want to change, then run it. If your internet connection isn't
permanent, you can "-runoffline" if you like, then "-update" when
you're online and you want to fetch/flush some more blocks. There's
various firewall options too. Then, a day or 2 after you've uploaded
your first blocks, search for your email address on
http://rc5stats.distributed.net and ask it to email you a
password. Use this password to join team #865 , which is the Egham
Hills team.
Nick Waterman. Network Consultant / Sysadmin - LEOnet
Beating tomorrow's technology into submission.
nick-sig@ Team *AMIGA*!
The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
