************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** A few years ago, 56-bit encryption schemes were considered unbreakable by anyone but those who owned a super computer. Since super computers were either in the hands of governments or kept under strict control, encryption schemes employing 56-bit keys were considered by the US government as safe for commerce. If the government wanted to crack something for reasons of state security, a super computer was available. If a hacker wanted to crack something to get at a credit card number, it was thought a typical PC would take several years to find the correct 56-bit key. In 1997 a form of computing emerged called "distributed computing". Basically, it's a way of networking computers, divvying out bits of a big job, and then tying it all back together again. It's a super computer on the cheap. Using distributed computing techniques, it was demonstrated that anyone with access to a computer network (basically anyone that works in an office these days) can crack a 56-bit encryption scheme in a matter of hours. That's not so good. Though the power of distributed computing is unsettling to security types, it's opened up some exciting possibilities when applied to the largest network of computers in the world: the Internet, of course. There are lot of spare computer time or "cycles" out there. Every time you get up from your computer to get a coffee or go to the bathroom, your computer isn't doing anything but consuming electricity. Most of us have our computers launch a screen saver after a few minutes of idle time. The most ambitious undertaking has been harnessing the net's spare cycles to find extraterrestrial life. The famous SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project uses massive radio telescopes to collect a broad range of radio spectrum. The theory is if an alien civilization wanted to let the rest of the galaxy know they were there, they would probably first use radio signals to broadcast their existence instead of trying to cross the vast distances between stars with rockets. It's estimated a manned mission to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would cost $30 quadrillion dollars... American. Neither America nor Bill Gates has that kind of change lying around. It's easy to set up some radio telescopes and vacuum up every bit of the electromagnetic spectrum bombarding earth but you need a lot of computing power to filter through the random garbage and find a signal that could only be the product of intelligent origins. Enter the SETI@Home project. The SETI@Home project divvies up the raw data downloaded by the telescopes and farms out the data processing to users who have signed on at the project's web site (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu). Volunteers can download a screensaver and an initial packet of raw data. When your computer detects a predefined idle period, it invokes the screensaver and begins crunching the numbers. What it's actually doing is beyond my scope of understanding. It does things like baseline smoothing, fast Fourier transformations, and curve fitting. I like looking at the blinking lights. After your computer has completed a work unit, the screensaver fires back the results. SETI people then determine if you've discovered the answer to one of humanity's ultimate questions or you've just burned one hundred hours of computer time processing the radio waves emitted by a belching star. Discovering the answer to the question "are we alone?" can be slow work. My computer, a blazingly unfast laptop, has spent over a hundred hours of idle time and managed to crunch through one and half units of work. I'm a major slacker if you look at some of the statistics on the SETI@Home page. A team at Silicon Graphics has processed over 200,000 work units. Their number crunchers can do in 4 hours what it take my laptop nearly three days to do. Of course, it's not quantity that counts. It's quality. If your work unit contains an intelligent message from space aliens, you'll share in the credit. Image that, being famous because you take a lot of long coffee breaks.