distributed-net

Donate your extra CPU cycles to a worthy cause! distributed.net started in 1997 as a project whose purpose was to win a series of contests sponsored by RSA Data Security Inc., to crack their RC5 encryption by brute-force methods. These contests were meant to show governments of nations such as the United States, who limit exports or use of cryptography, that the standards allowed are too weak for general use. Since this time, distributed.net's focus has changed from solely cracking RSA's RC5 and DES projects to working on more diverse distributed computing problems. The ongoing projects are RC5-72 and Optimal Golomb Rulers (28-mark), the latter of which has practical applications in science. There are also a number of other projects which are either periodic or upcoming. You may choose which project you wish to participate in. Installing this package will allow unused CPU cycles on your computer to contribute to cracking the code. There should be no noticeable slowdown of your system, since the client runs niced, and only uses CPU time when your computer would otherwise be idle.