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Originally Posted by IMDWalrus
Breaking the code is a HUGE no-no. Beyond the fact that it's virtually impossible (you'd need some pretty powerful computers to break it before Saturday morning), it completely violates the spirit of Gracious Professionalism.
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I just wanted to point out that noone is going to break the code unless they are REALLY good guessers. The possible combinations would require years to test with even the best programs.
I earlier this week wrote a program to test as many combinations as possible and compare them to the hash output on the test d/l.
if you assume that they only use letters and numbers, that is 62 characters(case sensitive). You would also assume the password is less than 20 characters long, as the test one i beleive was a whopping 16 or so.
so that equals 62^20 combinatiosn: roughly 7x10^35 combinations. Now, my computer is easily one of the best public access machines in the project(brand new A64 w/a gig a ram!) and i was able to process roughly 45,000 entries per second.
That equals 496380450946359732065174.37892241 years. Thats right, it would take 1 computer longer than the lifespan of the universe to break the code... hense why the government trusts it.
On a further note, the full gov standard uses a larger character set, and 128 code length. it would take roughly 4x10^72 years to break it in that case.
So you see, unless they use some blatently obvoius and guessable password, this is not going to be broken by the kickoff. I dont think CD has to worry about any of the other people breaking the code by the kickoff.