Use this graphic to link to us! http://user.itl.net/~neddy/penn.jpg

The PennMUSH RC5DES effort

For information on RC5DES and Distributed.net (DCTI), click on the banner below.

What is this effort?
Its a team-work attack on the 'RC5' and 'DES' encryption schemes. This team is part of a vast distributed computing effort (the worlds most powerful computer?). The banner above will take you to Distributed.net's homepage, offering full technical explanations on all this stuff. Suffice to say that our team name is quite expressive - if you run a PennMUSH, are a user on a PennMUSH, or have anything else to do with Penn, you are extremely welcome to join in!

How do I join in?
Click on the banner above, and follow the links to download the latest client for your system. It'll use your idle CPU time (this should not interfere with normal operations to any noticeable extent) to 'crack' encrypted blocks, attempting to find the 'key' to the entire puzzle (a better explanation can be found on the DCTI homepage).

To actually become part of the Penn team, you must visit the 'participant information' page (usually visible from the statistics page - no links exist from here, since the actual URL changes from time to time), and select 5066 as your team.

If you have trouble with this, please drop us a line (using the link at the bottom of this page).

What happens if we win?
Most of the prize money gets split between DCTI and a charity (chosen by all the RC5DES participants in a weighted vote). This leaves some part going to the winning team (or individual). Although the odds of winning anything are very small, you'll want to know what happens if we do. Rather than donate our share to charity (a significant donation would be made anyway, as I said), the Team's share will go to providing more hosting for MUSHes (as per the free.pennmush.org stuff). Note that taking part does not guarantee you any claim to these resources, should we win (although all participants are welcome to suggest how the distribution of resources should occur). It's a dream to win anyway - the odds are much worse than the lottery. The main point of doing this is to make a point about the availability of public encryption.

What does this have to do with pennmush.org/The PennMUSH development team?
Short answer: Nothing.
Everyone taking part is a PennMUSH user/admin/something, but this is not officially sanctioned by the development team (don't worry, we checked with them, and they don't object to it taking place).