The initial effort to win the RC5-56 contest was started by
New Media Laboratories. Due to various
internal factors, New Media opted to discontinue their involvement
in the decryption effort. In the chaos that arose after the New
Media server mysteriously disappeared, a student at Harvey Mudd
college, Jeff Lawson (aka Bovine), coded the Bovine Proxy Keyserver.
Initially, the goal was to allow the New Media effort to continue, storing
completed keys, until the New Media server came back online.
However, after it became clear that New Media would not be returning
to the effort, the Key Server was modified to act as the master
coordinator, completely controlling key generation and assuming
full control of the effort. The rest, as they say, is history.
As the newly formed Bovine Project began to gain members, and
therefore computing power, it occurred to us that a large, distributed
computer like ours could be used to solve several interesting problems
unrelated to RC5 or even encryption. distributed.net
registered as an official nonprofit organization (officially
Distributed Computing Technologies, Inc.) in November of 1997
with this new, long-range goal in mind. In support of this new goal a
new class of general purpose client, is being designed. The future
clients will be modular and will support any number of different,
challenge specific computing cores. The completion of those clients
will make it possible for distributed.net to take part in a
large number of distributed computing projects at the same time.
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