The Dead Deckers Society collects fans of the Shadowrun RPG into a Project Bovine team.

• OGR-25 Team statistics
• OGR-25 Team members yesterday
• OGR-25 Team members overall
• OGR-24 Team members overall

The RC5-64 challenge is done.

• RC5 Team statistics
• RC5 Team members yesterday
• RC5 Team members overall

What is Project Bovine?

Project Bovine is an effort organized by distributed.net to crack a message encrypted with the RC5 algorithm using a 64-bit key. The idea is to get thousands of personal computers to try all possible key combinations during times when they would otherwise be idle. Joining involves running software on your computer that unobtrusively uses idle CPU cycles, and periodically communicates progress to central servers as distributed.net.

The Bovine client runs on about every modern platform and OS you can think of.

What is the Dead Deckers Society?

Bovine lists statistics of how many keys everyone has processed. They allow groups of people to lump their efforts together as a team. Teams are formed for a number of reasons, mostly to show support for one thing or another. For example, the team that has currently processed the most keys (by a very large margin) is a Macintosh advocacy group.

The Dead Deckers Society (in this context, at least) is a team made up of people who enjoy Shadowrun.

How do I join?

First, download the client and start cracking keys. The best way to do this is to read the instructions provided by distributed.net.

Once you are up and running, you can join the Dead Deckers Society. You need to know that the id number for the team is 9106. To use this number to join the team, follow these instructions.

You should also subscribe to the distributed.net announcement list. This is a very low volume (I've only seen two or three messages come out of it so far), moderated list that will allow you to receive information about important rc5 events.

What's in it for me?

Apart from the pride of being a part of what distributed.net calls "the worlds fastest computer", the illicit thrill of cracking secret messages and the knowledge that you will be using the Internet in a way never attempted on such a scale before, there is a cash reward for finding the correct key.

The inventors of RC5 (RSA Data Security) have offered a $10,000 reward to the project that first deciphers the message, by any means. Distributed.net, who is coordinating the thousands of people involved in Project Bovine, will divide this prize money as follows:

• $1000 to the person who actually finds the correct key
• $1000 to that person's team
• $2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code
• $6000 to a non-profit organization, decided by vote. Each key you test is a single "vote".

Should a member of the Dead Deckers Society find the key, the reward given to the team will be given to the individual who found the key. This is preferable to inventing some arcane method of dividing the money among the participants, and will be much easier to carry out.

What else can I do?

Once you are up on running on one machine, try to get up an running on more.

Above all... recruit! The more people that join us, the better. Feel free to distrubute the URL to this page far and wide.

How do I tell the software not to process OGR packets

Left to its own devices, the Bovine software will cycle between OGR and RC5 processing. This can be annoying if you only want to do RC5 processing. To set this up, enter the configuration screen:

1. Choose "Buffer and Buffer Update Options" (option 2).
2. Choose "Additional Buffer Level Checking" (option10).
3. Change this to "Update on a per-project buffer exhuastion" (option 4).
4. Choose "Load Work Precedence" (option 9) and put RC5 in front of OGR. Also, set "OGR=0".

What kind of machines do members use?

What follows is a list of the machines being used by members, sorted by e-mail address. To avoid netbots pulling addresses for spam purposes, only the initial portion of the address is used. You can compare the keyrates in the using the statistics links at the top of this page to see how the machines measure up.

If you are not listed, send me some mail with your machine(s) stats. (Remove the leading "da" from the address, as these characters are there to fool spam-bots.)

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