From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 11:28:39 PDT
To: Mike Fletcher <fletch@ain.bls.com>
Subject: Re: Java idea
Message-ID: <199510101828.LAA17877@ix2.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 09:54 AM 10/10/95 -0400, Mike Fletcher <fletch@ain.bls.com> wrote:
>
>Well, security bugs aside (and I've got the sun4.1.3_u1 and Win32 ns2b
>distributions :) has anyone given any thought to using Java to do some
>sort of Chinese Lottery attack.  I was re-reading App. Crypto. last
>night and it could be feasable.  If you could get your key cruncher
>thread loaded into a good many browsers to run when idle . . . .  How
>many estimated copies of NS are there?  Anyone want to do the math? :)

Yeah, this was discussed; mix it in with a cool screen saver 
        "We're busy hacking Microsoft!" bouncing around the screen
and you could probably get a lot of people to try it, assuming of course
that it can run in offline mode conveniently, which I'm not sure
Netscape can yet (downloading the software, copying mozock/nullsock as
winsock, and restarting Netscape doesn't strike me as convenient,
which means it's also not an off-line mail/news reader yet.)

The negative part is that Java Bytecode interpretation is about 10x slower
than native code; you'd have to get people to download native libraries
for their platform to do the grunt work.
#---
#                                       Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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