The Kember Identity
by Tim Faircloth on May 6, 2009, 2:24 pm
Today in my travels, I ran across a page concerning The Kember Identity. In short, this guy (Elliot Kember) is looking for a 32-character hexadecimal string that that is the same as that string’s MD5 sum (he does a better job of explaining it).
The issue he’s running across is that there are 16^32 possible MD5 sums. That’s 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or roughly 340*10^36.
To store every possible sum, you’d need 17,592,186,044,416 YottaBytes of space. That’s 17.5 trillion times HP’s estimated data storage capacity for humans by 2013.
If one computer runs through 40,000 strings every second (approximately how fast my my machine goes, utilizing 100% of one CPU), it’ll take 269,757,076,770,150,354,724,263,228 years to get through them all.
If everyone in the world (6,790,062,216 people, according to CIA records) each used one computer to calculate 100,000 strings per second, it would still take 1,591,720,484,991,568 years — 1.5 quadrillion (1.5 million billion) years — to run through them all.
Kember’s idea is to have as many people as possible run the code, hoping somebody will get lucky and find a reversible MD5 sum in his lifetime.
Fat chance, but that doesn’t stop me from running a script on my machine that runs the task (currently I’ve gone through almost 600 million unique strings). I say help him out! Even if you don’t join his pool, it’ll be interesting to see how many people we can get in on this.
Superman Flies
by Tim Faircloth on May 2, 2009, 1:31 pm
In case you can’t read that, it says:
Certificate of Achievement
This certifies that Timothy P. Faircloth has successfully completed ground and aerial training and performed a skydive in accordance with the Basic Safety Requirements of the United States Parachute Association at:
Americus, GA www.jumpjax.com
This citation is awarded in recognition of his outstanding achievement and as testimony thereof.
May 2, 2009
Andrew Collins (Instructor)
Jared Russel (Video)
That’s right, I (along with several of my friends here in Americus) jumped out of a plane at 13,500 feet (a little more than 2.5 miles) strapped to some dude I’d never met (luckily he had a parachute on), and free-fell for almost a minute before he opened his chute and we floated gracefully to the ground.
It’s one of the most awesome experiences I’ve ever had… I can’t explain it any further. You’ll just have to try it yourself.
The video should be here within the week, along with a few stills. I’ll keep you posted.