this great guy - Slashdot User

+ - Company Announces 65nm Bitcoin Mining Chip-> 0

Submitted by

this great guy

on Wednesday November 07, 2012 @11:26PM

this great guy writes "A private company announced a full custom 65nm ASIC for mining bitcoins. They claim that consumer devices based on the chip will start shipping to customers this December. The design costs are estimated at half a million dollars, and have reportedly been funded by external venture capital. We are witnessing the birth of a specialized Bitcoin mining industry."
Link to Original Source

+ - Breaking UNIX crypt() on the PlayStation 3 0

Submitted by

Marc Bevand

on Monday October 06, 2008 @12:46PM

Marc Bevand writes "Last week at the ToorCon 10 hacker conference in San Diego, I presented Breaking UNIX crypt() on the PlayStation 3, a talk focused on optimizing the bruteforcing speed of DES-based crypt() password hashes for the Cell B.E. processor by implementing a technique known as bitslicing. I am glad to announce that source code has just been released and this implementation averages 45.5 gates per S-box. This is by no mean a replacement for a tool like John the Ripper (which supports many advanced features and other hashing algorithms), but nonetheless a comparison between the two is interesting. The PS3's 65nm 3.2 GHz Cell processor can test 11.5 million password/sec while consuming only 130W. This represents a performance/dollar result 4.4x better than John the Ripper on a quad-core 3.2 GHz QX9770, or 1.6x better than a 2.66GHz Q6700; a performance/Watt ratio 1.5x better than both; and an absolute cracking speed respectively 8% and 30% faster."

+ - IAEA Cracks Nuclear Ring's Hard Drive Encryption-> 0

Submitted by this great guy on Sunday June 15, 2008 @08:20PM

this great guy writes "A NY Times article about the nuclear smuggling network ran by Abdul Qadeer Khan reveals: 'It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material [...]. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.'. Given that Khan's revelations were made in early 2004, does that mean it took the IAEA 1-2 years to bruteforce the encryption ? Did they receive help from the NSA ?"
Link to Original Source

+ - Sun To Unveil Project Blackbox

Submitted by this great guy on Tuesday October 17, 2006 @04:13AM

this great guy writes "A year ago, Google's secret plans for a portable data center in a shipping container were being revealed by Robert X. Cringely. Today, the news broke out that Sun Microsystems is about to officially unveil Project Blackbox: plans for a full-scale production of data centers in 20-foot-long cargo shipping containers by next summer."