What would you use an epic distributed computer for?
If you had a distributed computing platform in your possession that was 10, or even 100, times more powerful than platforms available today, what would you use it for?

What kind of commercial/crypto applications could processing power of that kind provide do you think? Out of the box ideas are more than welcome.

Hypothetical question... of course Wink.

For a point of reference, Folding@Home is currently ~40 petaflops.
are you asking what you should do with your botnet?
I was thinking, something like what www.distributed.net is doing could be interesting (ie. finding prime factors for breaking 768-bit RSA encryption), for example.

(05-28-2014, 01:37 AM)epixoip Wrote: are you asking what you should do with your botnet?

I put the "Wink" to make people think that (as a joke). But really it's just hypothetical Sad.
Sounds like a good way to get a NSL or threat of a drone strike.

Solutions like this were talked about way back when there were no good distributed solutions, and the fact that it would become a platform for nefarious purposes will hold it back. MOST of the community here are using hashcat for completely legitimate reasons (pentests, audits, forensics, etc).

Imagine if you will, Bob user wants to join in on a distributed hash cracking platform. Alice owns a gov site and posts user hashes to be cracked via this system. Bob has no knowledge of where this stuff comes from, but plausible deniability doesn't work because common sense dictates that he should have known the risk of this prior to joining. Anyway, a hash gets cracked and Alice uses it to access some financial records or something. Government agencies swoop in and start tracking everything back to its sources. Some federal agency is now knocking on Bob's door for something he considered harmless.

Basically, it's more trouble than it's worth, and can get people in trouble. This is also what happened to hashkiller... Servers were seized by US entities even though they weren't located in the US, peoples doors were knocked on, shit got real for many of them.

If you would like to do more reading on how countries can reach out and punch someone, check this out: