At 22:45 -0700 1999-04-21, Joey Hess wrote:
That's not completly fair. Distributed.net has released the core code for their client, they just haven't released their networking protocols. It's really an interesting problem, and perhaps one of the places where open source breaks down - how can you be sure if you release the code that someone doesn't fake results? Until someone coms up with a method of preventing this type of abuse, I don't expect to see them change their ways.
I recall many instances of fake results back when I used to do rc5-56, this was without the benefit of source. One does not need source to reverse engineer a networking protocol. Security through obscurity is not really security.
BTW, if anyone is looking for something to use your idle CPU time for that at least lets you see the source, see <http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm>. The source is available on the FTP site, and is a bit tough to build under Linux, but it can be done. Unfortunately there is not really a license I could find in the source, so it is definitely not free software. In addition, a full build depends on non-free software.
-- Joel Klecker (aka Espy) Debian GNU/Linux Developer <URL:mailto:jk@espy.org> <URL:mailto:espy@debian.org> <URL:http://web.espy.org/> <URL:http://www.debian.org/>