Ahh, it's good to see the old crackheads showing up; Joe, Polo, Peter, "I've fallen and I can't get up" Ray, Dave, Mech, Wolfie, JonB(I have a licence now, your daughter will never be safe again), and the list goes on. For the record, there are actually people that pre-date me by a tad, and Joe should be able to back me up on it; but some of the original crackers included Becks, Jackal(who wrote the first FAQ), and Amok(the only guy who was ever smarter than his computer).
For the answers to the questions:
Anyone here remember the CSC or DES projects?
Yes, there was the DES projects to prove that the old DES standards uses for exportable encyptions were too weak. Dnet held 5 contests I believe(DES I to III, with 2 tests for DES II I believe). In the last contest, the EFF participated with their quarter-million dollar cracking machine, which pumped out the same rate as all the Dnet crackers combined(I hesitate to say 90GK/sec here). DES III was cracked just shy of 24 hours.
CSC was a longer short-term project that lasted a few months, and was sponsored by the company that made the CSC algorithm. Because of a bug in the keymaster, the keys from the 20%-40% range were bad, and had to be re-done, from which the winning key was in. TA did well in CSC.
Anyone remember what Dcypher.net was?
Dcypher.net was both the first company to do CSC(Dnet came later), and the company that did GammaFlux. While they weren't sucessful financially(they had to close up shop in early 2001, I believe), we're still on good terms with Charrison, and Otlg22(Steve). Steve actually provided a Win2K licence for the Edge.
Anone remember the ViRGE fiasco?
How can I not remember it? Thanks to those psychos like JonB, Hutch, Maggie(Hutch's GF, and X's crush), Ray, ect; I picked up 271084 blocks, putting me in first place by about 3K blocks. Not only did I pee my pants(which I really did, BTW:Q), but it provided for some of the best reading material the team has. Thanks again for that guys.
Can you identify what a PTE is?
Project Total Eclispe. The idea behind a PTE is to secretly amass blocks to give to someone who has done a lot of work for the team. While it's harder to pull off nowadays because of the size and time needed to do SETI WUs, they still happen from time to time.
Do you know what the e-mail addy was for the WarpCore?
Warpcore@montac.com. The WarpCore was TA's first truely public crackrack composed of 12 BP6 boards complete with Celeron 450A's. The entire project ran off a very nicely done power panel system designed by Cautry(Clay), and his pal, Nevin(who designed Arctic Silver). It was one of our first major Linux racks too, as it used a heavily customized version of RedHat 5.x. The Warpcore could put out ~11K blocks a day at the time, which was good enough for the top 5 in TA's stats.
Can you remember what the original host name mika used for the stats page?
It is indeed mika.dynip.com. Mika volunteered to run a stats page, and has since then served as our resident website operator, who was kind enough to host TA's web boxes up to this day(first at work, then starting ~2 months ago, at his home).
Other questions
The Alien-Cow Wars
The Alien-Cow Wars were the flame treads that errupted from when SETI@Home first came online. Because is was the first major project besides the RC5 project, there was a lot of momentum to have people switch over. However, the internal recruiting didn't go over too well, which started the flame threads. Ultimately, it was solved from within TA(we had never needed a Mod), and its reprecussions still dictate what's acceptable for internal recruiting for a project.
Random Factoids
DStroth, a member of TA, it roumered to glow green. He had 3 17" monitors at one point durring the summer, and it has been theorized that he absorbed enough radiation(more than JonB, who works at a nuclear reactor:Q) to glow green.
A long time joke in IRC has been between myself and JonB over his lovely daughter. Because of our similar ages, I've always faked that I've had a crush on her(in a manical way). One day we were joking in IRC, and his daughter saw what we were typing. Needless to say, she was a tad freaked out.
My Question To You
BKehoe, our head IRC OP, hasn't always been a TA member. Who did he originally crack for?