Here is a non-Yahoo! related post that I responded to on Astahost. Considering it is an interesting answer and it took some thought and time to create, I am also posting it here. An Astahost member, FireFoxRules, asks the following question (http://www.astahost.com/Downloading-Internet-t21292.html):

I’m wondering if it is possible to save a copy of everything on the Internet. Ignoring ISP data transfer limitations (max GB per month), I have a download speed of approximately 4 Mbps.

The Internet isn’t limited to web pages though, it includes everything that is public accessible (not password-protected) which includes all music, videos, pictures, software, etc. Furthermore, I am not limiting it to HTTP servers as torrents, files on FTP servers and anything on peer-to-peer networks (Gnutella/LimeWire) will count as well.

Saving everything at its current state (ignoring changes to the live version after it is saved), how long will this take? What if I upgrade my Internet connection, or theoretically use all the bandwidth of (for example) educational institutions (universities), ISPs (Shaw, Comcast, etc) and large corporations (Microsoft, Google, etc).

I am not talking about indexing content, I mean saving the actual file. Every web page would be considered one file, and pictures, JavaScript, CSS, etc would be their own files.

My response:

Interesting question. I am actually surprised that that you, FireFoxRules, asked it as it sounds like a crazy idea that I would expect from a newb. At any rate it did get me to think so I will propose an answer.

Assumptions

• You have an insane Internet backbone connection will guaranteed reliability and speed. I will assume that you have a 100 Mb/sec connection which is usually only available to ISP level organizations.
• You have an appropriately sized upstream connection to do all the requesting.
• You actually get the bandwidth you paid for. I personally have a “10 Mb/sec down and 1 Mb/sec up” consumer cable connection. I have never seen anything close to these numbers in real life. The closest I have seen is 2 Mb/sec down (downloading ISOs from Microsoft MSDN) and there is a hard limit of around 115 kb/sec up that I constantly hit. A more typical download speed is around 500 kb/sec for regular web browsing.
• We will ignore all network structure and latency issues and assume you have a direct connection to your target with no hops in between.
o The nature of TCP/IP will limit you to around 80% of your bandwidth under ideal operation. When you have only two computers on a network (the idea case) you will still never get 100% bandwidth because of TCP header overhead, IP header overhead, other traffic such as ARP requests, and IP timing issues. A typical network usually sees only 45-50% bandwidth because of collisions. A stressed out network may only get 10%.
o There is latency between your request and the data.
 Machine and router hardware delays. Usually microseconds.
 Every hop adds delay. Usually milliseconds.
 Server response time. Usually small compared to everything else but could become an issue. Ranges from milliseconds (typical) to minutes.

o In total you should expect to take at least 50% off your promised bandwidth in an idea case. This brings out 100 Mb/sec connection to more like 50 Mb/sec; but as stated earlier, we are ignoring this.
o Internet speed is based on more than your connection speed. The bandwidth of the server is also very important. You may have sufficient bandwidth but if you request from a server that is slower than your connection, you are stuck with their speed. I find that a typical website will only transfer up to 50 kb/sec so you will have to download from many different servers at the same time to fill your 100 Mb/sec pipe.

• You have enough computing power. At 100 Mb/sec you are starting to get into the range of IDE hard drive data transfer range. You will also want to have several threads going at the same time to maximize bandwidth utilization. You want to download a different webpage while you are waiting on the request for a separate page. Better yet, you want to keep your bandwidth pipe full even if you hit a slow server or a timeout which can be up to 2 minutes. I would guess that you would need 150-300 threads or requests going at the same time to meet this demand. A single computer likely will not be able to do this alone so you would end up with at least 5-10 servers on your end to pull this off. This of course breaks the idea case of no network congestion or collisions as described earlier.
• You have enough storage space. A quick search shows that YouTube alone has around 7.7 petabytes of content (http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-videos-on-youtube/ ). Newegg is showing 1TB hard drives for around $90. With the needed hardware and controllers, you are looking at around $100/ TB. At this rate you will need 7700 1 TB hard drives which would cost you around $770,000. A related article on BackBlaze (http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/) shows you how to build your own 67 TB 4U rack server for $7,867 including drives and rack hardware. At the BackBlaze rate, 7.7 PB will cost $904,118 or almost 1 million dollars.

Gottchas

• Connection speeds are measured in BITS and not BYTES. There are 8 bits to a byte so this means that you need to divide your connection speed by 8 right off the top. This will make our 100 Mbit/sec connection a 12.5 Mbyte/sec connection. With typical network delays, this would become 6.25 Mbyte/sec.

Now let’s do some calculations (whips out trusty TI-89 calculator).

12.5 Mbyte/sec*60 seconds = 750 MB/min
750 MB/min* 60 mins = 45 GB/hour
45 GB/hour *24 hours = 1080 GB/day or ~1 TB/day (1.08e12)

With the YouTube example above of 7.7 petabytes (10e15)…

7.7e15 Bytes/1.08e12 Bytes/day=7129.63 days
7129.63 days/365 days/year = 19.5332 years

Just downloading the YouTube database with an insane Internet connection will take you almost 20 years and almost 1 million dollars just in hard drive storage.

Hope this answers your question

A story on Slashdot entitled “Looking To Spammers To Solve Hard AI Problems” (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/19/024213#)points to an article in the New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16973-innovation-harnessing-spammers-to-advance-ai.html) detailing how solving CAPTCHAs (those impossible to type word images) to spread SPAM can be a good thing. Although SPAM is a nuisance, the act of solving CAPTCHAs automatically is a tough artificial intelligence (AI) problem. Since the first appearance of CAPTCHAs, spammers have developed new and novel approaches to solving these image puzzles which in turn has helped the larger AI community. In fact, a current spammer bounty is for half a million dollars to break the reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html) system. This turns out to be all most five times as lucrative as the top AI academic prize called the Loebner Prize (http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html).

The next question that some CAPTCHA researchers are proposing is not how to beat the spammers but what technology do they need a boost in. By making a CAPTCHAs out of currently unreachable problems, spammers of the future will pave the way for better AI, digital cameras, and other beneficial technologies.

UPDATE: Viprasys is back at http://www.viprasys.org

One of the best Yahoo! discussion forums that I have found is viprasys.com which was a big traffic generator for this site. I have to say “was” because viprasys is currently offline and there are rumors that it will not be back anytime soon. According to discussions at DSL Reports (http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r21955960-Viprasys), the site was taken down due to an illegal eBook hosted on the site. It is hard to get many more facts because the thread quickly degenerated into a shouting match and eventually was quarantined by DSL Reports. It is a shame that such a great resource is now gone due to not Yahoo! complaining but someone with copyright issues. This certainly makes me want to write a check to the RIAA right now.

There is also a question posted at Yahoo! Questions (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090225040444AACKpih) about the outage and the answers imply that viprasys will be back but perhaps under a different name. If any of the viprasys administrators need money to get their site back, let me know and I will be more than glad to pitch in a few dollars.

Here is my roughly 5 month update and I am still with Microsoft Vista and much happier now. It turns out that the majority of my problems were not with Vista but my firewall, Zone Alarm Free (http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/zonealarm-pc-security-free-firewall.htm). The downright odd behavior with not being able to create new connections, not being able to kill hung processes, and just general system instability was all Zone Alarm. After endless Google searches (and four months) for such things as “vista unable to kill process”, “vista network stack failure”, “ and “vista network problems” I noticed that Zone Alarm was mentioned in more than one of the pages that I searched for. I finally followed a link back to the Zone Alarm forums and saw many posts that were describing problems not exactly like, but similar to my own. By this time I thought anything was worth a shot and uninstalled/restarted. When the system came back up, 95% of the problems were gone and I have been symptom free ever since. Due to the problems with not being able to kill a hung process such as Firefox or Internet Explorer I never thought that the firewall would be the problem. This goes to show you how deeply integrated a modern firewall program can be. In essence the firewall is part of the operating system and if it isn’t functioning at 100% then you will see problems. Here is one of the articles that got me on the right track (http://www.techspot.com/blog/76/zonealarm-for-windows-vista-dont-do-it/).

And there is a rundown of the original problems and the current outcome.

IE STOPS RESPONDING ALL THE TIME

In the original post I mentioned that this happened with no programs installed. I have come to realize that this was not completely true because I did have all of the basics such as antivirus and firewall loaded at the time. I will still occasionally have Internet Explorer or Firefox crash on me but this has mostly gone away with the removal of Zone Alarm. Issue closed.

WHERE IS MY UP ARROW?

I have learned to live without the up arrow for the most part but it is still annoying. I have come to like how each folder is displayed in the explorer bar and I can quickly jump up several levels. The problems stick around when there is a file dialogue displayed and you start in some very obscure part of the file structure and there is no side folder browser. This usually happens during installs where a program uses an older version of the file select API. Another problem can occur when the folder name is longer than the explorer bar width. In this case only one folder is shown and the benefit of jumping several folders at once is negated. With more Microsoft training I will eventually get used to it but I still often find myself saying, “where is that !@#$ up arrow.” Issue still open.

UNABLE TO KILL PROCESSES

As described above this was all Zone Alarm. Even more at (http://forums.zonealarm.org/zonelabs/). Issue closed.

CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY
After the initial install this just went away. The problem was mostly on a secondary internal hard drive that I use for backup and some applications. I went through and removed the old XP owners from the file permissions and added the new Vista users. A more detailed explanation has already been posted by me in #8 of this thread. Issue closed.

UAC

I am running UAC now but it can still be slightly annoying. It was off for several months but I turned it back on. I have learned that if I reorganize my start menu or some other task that requires hundreds of UAC acknowledgments then I will just turn it off and then back on. I also have a few regularly used programs that have to start under Administrator privileges so waiting for the extra 5 seconds it takes to display the UAC screen is the slightly annoying part. I still think it is a good idea but it should be faster. Issue still “slightly” open.

SHUTDOWN PROGRAMS

Same thing as before, Zone Alarm Free. (If you can’t tell, Zone Alarm is not ranked so highly in my book now.) Issue closed.

RAID RUNNING SLOW

I didn’t bring this up in the original article but after installing Vista the performance of my RAID controller handling my second hard drive went to you know where. When transferring data on my primary hard drive, which is SATA directly on the motherboard, I was having no problem getting 25-50 MB/sec. On the RAID card I was lucky to get 3 MB/sec. The performance was so bad that a USB 1.0 flash drive would outperform it. The card is a 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML SATA RAID 5 card with 256 MB onboard memory and a PCI Express connection. Under XP I never noticed a great difference of speed between the primary and secondary hard drives but under Vista the performance difference was scary. New drivers and a firmware flash did nothing. I eventually decided to reposition the card and remembered that I had it in a 1x PCIe slot. I moved it to one of the 16x slots (I have capability for dual video cards but only have one) and now the thing moves like it’s on rails. I’m not sure why Vista likes the 16x PCIe slot so much more than the 1x slot but it works and I am glad to have this behind me also. Issue closed.

CONCLUSION

Since that faithful day when I uninstalled Zone Alarm, the sky has turned blue (perhaps partly cloudy) the sun is shining, and the birds have been chirping in the background. My problems are now fairly run of the mill and I can’t say that I am having any more problems than under XP. I am still impressed with the boot time compared to XP and that interface is still prettier. My biggest headache was getting all of my applications converted from XP to Vista. Some made the jump just fine but others had to be completely scrapped and a new solution found. After most of the third-party problems have been isolated I will have to recommend Vista to anyone who is looking for a new computer. Zone Alarm Free is now completely forbidden on any of my computers and I may upgrade some of my other computers to Vista in the coming months.

A CAPTCHA cracking company called Xrumer (botmaster.net) is claiming to have broken the latest Microsoft CATPCHA and the Google CAPTCHA (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/10/02/1415205) (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/10/01/2243241).

It has been about a week since I have installed Vista and I have some updates and more comments. Only a few days ago it was still a toss up to whether or not I was going to reinstall Windows XP. Then I was slightly more in favor of XP. Now it is still a toss up but the advantage has gone to Vista for staying. I have become a little bit more familiar with the system and some of my personal habits have changed so it is not as dreadful as it once was.

CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY

I have managed to move this to the resolved category. The knowledge base article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549 does a good job at describing the problem. Basically Vista and XP both set the read-only attribute on folders and I went back to a XP machine to verify this. When in the context of a folder, read-only means nothing and is only a signal to the OS that the folder customization should be shown (i.e. those annoying .ini files that makes your Pictures folder show thumbnails and not straight file listings). While the default folder behavior is the same, the default file behavior is not. Vista will by default put a read-only attribute on all files where XP did not and this is the root cause of my problem.

I tested this and found that when removing the read-only attribute from a folder, all read-only file attributes were cleared. The drive that I was having this particular problem came from my previous system so the owner of all the files was the old XP account so I also took ownership of the files. In the end the problem has been solved even though I consider it poor communication on Microsoft’s part.

Here is in-depth explanation of what I done.
1. Right click the folder in question and select properties.
2. Click the security tab.
3. Click Advanced
4. Click Edit
5. Using the permissions dialogues, set USERS and any other applicable accounts to Full Control.
6. Delete the old XP account which is a Windows SSID.
7. Uncheck Inherit from parent
8. Check Replace permissions
9. Acknowledge all open dialogue boxes and wait for the permissions to be set. I had an entire hard drive to set so it took a few hours.

This is a sad tale of a man and his machine that would not start again. The story continues with a sorted affair between two operating systems and a battle to win the love of this man�s heart.

My problems began last weekend when I started my computer after it had been off from the previous night. Everything went normally throughout the POST but once Windows XP started I heard the dreaded clicking from the hard drive. After several reboots and a Spinrite diagnostic I gave up and called the time of death around three in the afternoon. This is not all bad because I had the drive fully backed up with no loss of data. Actually this may be an opportunity to try something new.

A few months back I purchased an MSDN subscription from Microsoft and I had access to all of the latest operating systems, including Vista. This would be an excellent time to start fresh and try out Vista at the same time. After all, Vista has been on market for well over a year and I have never had the opportunity to introduce myself. This should be fun.

EDITORS NOTE: Anywhere you see a bold statement at the beginning of a paragraph; I would appreciate help if you have a solution to this particular problem. Now, on to the story.

After I installed a new Seagate hard drive to replace the broken Western Digital (WD), I quickly dove into the Windows Vista install process. Everything went great and I was surprised at how fast and clean the process went since I had never installed Vista before. After the installation was complete and the machine rebooted for the last time, I was also impressed at the boot speed. Everything appeared to be fantastic.

I logged on for the first time and I have to say that I was impressed. Vista really does look good. My first annoyance was the start menu and no icons on the desktop. I soon remedied that problem by switching almost everything to the classic view. It took a few minutes to discover all of the new hiding places for settings but I managed as most of the control panel structure follows XP’s lead.

IE STOPS RESPONDING ALL THE TIME

And then the first problem hit me straight in the noise. Internet Explorer starts half the time and stops responding after opening the other half. On a brand new install with no programs loaded this was a real irritation. Of course when this happens, you can’t just close the window, it takes a minute for it to respond and then ask if it should be restarted. In that same amount of time I could have already killed the process and opened a new window myself. Also for some reason it takes 10 seconds for the window to finally shut. It looks like this is certainly one thing they should have gotten right. I ended up downloading FireFox just to get on the Internet.

WHERE IS MY UP ARROW?

My next battle started during the mass software installation phase. To be quite honest I have my fair share of programs that I don’t always use frequently but when I need them I need them. This phase can take almost a day in itself. I noticed that of course the Windows Explorer had changed but I didn’t notice the missing up arrow or the go to parent directory button. XP has always had the back arrow but I never used it because I know where I am in the directory structure and shortcuts can break where you want to go. For instance, you follow a shortcut to My Documents and then want to go to the Users folder, just hit the up arrow. But now it is missing.

UNABLE TO KILL PROCESSES

After messing with Vista for about a day I started having application problems (besides of course IE which is still not working at this point). Apparently a few of my XP programs do not like to play nice with Vista. The main offenders are FireFox, plink (party of the Putty suite for SSH), and eMule. I have heard that power user don’t especially like Vista but before I started I chalked this up to just unfamiliarity of the operating system. After all a new operating system plays by different rules and it take some time to learn the rules. A new user, even a seasoned veteran, can get frustrated by not being able to do things as quickly as they did before. This next problem just made my head split open and a little demon pop out. I am normally a very quite person but I let out a loud verbal obscenity that all the neighbors could hear.

FireFox had stopped working so I quickly opened up Task Manager and killed the process. The problem was that the process would not die! WTF? I tried several more times with no luck. I tried to restart FireFox and it would not open because another process by the same name was already open. It is understandable that the programmers behind FireFox wouldn’t want two process open at the same time but what happens when you can’t get rid of the first one? Perhaps this was a onetime bug and I restarted the computer. It came back up and I quickly downloaded Process Explorer from SysInternals. After a few minutes, sure enough FireFox had frozen again and I went to Process Explorer this time and had the same result. I then opened an Administrator command prompt and nothing once again happened. I restarted once again and started searching the web. I still haven’t found a definitive answer but some of Microsoft’s own posts suggest that this is the way Vista works and you have to live with it.

Same song different verse. I opened plink in a command window and connected to one of my SSH servers. Now I love plink because it gets the job done and all I have to do is launch a batch file to get a fairly complication connection started. To be fair it has always been buggy and would crash under XP, sometimes very unexpectedly. I would simply start the session again and keep SSHing away. Near the end of my application reload I needed some files from the SSH server so I started the batch file and started happily downloading. After around 30 minutes, plink crapped out on me but as usually I was not surprised. I double clicked on the batch file to reestablish the connection but nothing happened. Now this is odd. I opened Task Manager (I should have learned my lesson by now shouldn’t I) and saw that plink was still running. Please refer to the above paragraph because it was like a bad dream that kept coming back. This time I had another nasty surprise; apparently the entire networking stack was also involved/crashed and I had no network connectivity. WTF! Restart the computer and repeat.

Some song different verse. I opened eMule and started downloading a few “applications.” eMule crashed and guess what? I couldn’t kill the process. After experiencing this “feature” one too many times, I think Microsoft is STUPID for making this change. Now I will have to admit that the system never crashed during any of these application crashes and the GUI remained responsive at all times, which is the ultimate goal of any operating system, but what use is this if you have to restart the entire machine just because one application has crashed? After all I am the Administrator and I should have enough brain power when to decide to kill a process. So what if I want to kill a process? I may not have a good reason. Perhaps it looked at me wrong and I shoot the little SOB. It is still my box and I demand control over my own machine, otherwise I will have to restart every 45 minutes.

CAN NOT CHANGE ATTRIBUTES FROM READ ONLY

This is another what were they thinking? Apparently all of the folders on your hard drive are set to read only. I found out about this little nugget of goodness when I attached a removable hard drive to my machine and tried to change some files on it. It is not unusual for the operating system to set the files and folders to read only but I can’t permanently change the attributes. I open the properties to change the attributes and the UAC prompt pops up. I say yes and then remove the read only attribute. I close the property window, reopen it and the !@#$ thing is still read only!

UAC

This actually isn’t a problem. I commend Microsoft on this change and I gladly accept the extra feedback from the operating system. Now only if moving or deleting items from the start menu wasn’t a protected operation.

SHUTDOWN PROGRAMS

Sometimes you have a program that needs to run right before Windows shuts down. Interestingly enough this is a common operation and Microsoft has (apparently in the past) made API hooks and calls built into Windows to allow such things to work. What I am talking about is a wiping program that will clear your recycle bin, temp folders, and Internet Explorer cache before the machine is shutdown. It just so happens that I have found a great one that works wonderfully under XP but doesn’t exactly like Vista. The problem is that when the wiping is under way just before Windows Vista logs off the user, Vista detects it as a hung program and tries to kill the process. This is of course not what you want to happen and quickly leads to a BSOD. The next time you start the machine, Vista has done you a favor and removed the application from the shutdown order, grrrrrr.

What puzzles me is that there is a well known time during shutdown that a program can request to remain open. The program will send an API command to Windows saying, yes I know you want to shut down but give me a few more moments, I will tell you when I am done. Under XP this works as expected with the wiping utility but Vista apparently ignores this request. I am happy to say that I have a wide smile on my face every time this happens and I am looking at a BSOD. Blue really does bring out the color of my eyes.

CONCLUSION

If you have made it this far then I commend you and hopefully you had a small laugh at my expense. It is always fun to laugh at others. In all honestly if you have any suggestions to the above problems that I am having please let me know. I have already given up on this install and I will be starting from scratch once I get some pressing work done. Perhaps I will take it much slower next time and isolate some of the problems. If that doesn’t work then I am going back to Windows XP and perhaps never install Vista again. I really like Vista, it is beautiful, and just a fast as XP. Apparently the down side is that Microsoft thinks every user has had half their brain removed due to a lobotomy or horrific car crash. If I decide that I want to kill a process then damn it I should be able to.

I would seriously love to continue this conversation but it is getting hard to see the screen. eMule has crashed once again and is covering up half of the Microsoft Word document that I am typing in. IE is also crashed and I can see its outline behind this window also. Have fun while I restart once again (looks at watch, yep it’s been about 45 minutes).

There is a posting on Slashdot today entitled “Microsoft Helps Police Crack Your Computer” (http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/04/29/1441215.shtml). To summarize, Microsoft is distributing a thumb drive device with specialty forensics tools to select law enforcement officials. Apparently this is a beta test of the new tools to see how well they are accepted (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2004379751_msftlaw29.html).

The knee jerk reaction to this is that Microsoft has done it again but I don’t believe they are to blame. I am sure law enforcement initiated this course of action and Microsoft is only keeping one of their biggest customers happy. You can’t blame Microsoft because they only made the process easier. The tools to do all of this is already on the market, Microsoft has only shrink wrapped them and put a pretty bow on top. Of course there should be ways to forensically investigate computer systems but hearing things like this always makes be uneasy considering many of the privacy problems of the recent past. This is another reason to go over to www.truecrypt.org and download the latest version of their free whole disk encryption package.

Earlier this month is was reported that the Birmingham, Alabama school district was going to be the first to offer the One Laptop per Child (http://laptop.org/) in America (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1525219). This story caught my attention because it hits close to home (I will leave it up to your imagination in which way.) The basic idea is that eighth-grade Birmingham students will get the laptops at the beginning of the year and then turn them in at the end. If the laptops, which look like some sort of fancy toy, are lost or stolen, they can be remotely disabled.

Now comes the interesting questions. What happens when the very innocent and well intentioned city council sees some of the darker sides to giving every eighth-grader a laptop?

Now I don’t know if you can remember all the way back to this time in your life but I do remember a few bits and pieces. One of the biggest things on the mind of an eighth-graders mind is p0rn. The best place to find p0rn is on the Internet. The best way to get on the Internet is to have your very own laptop. I think you can see where I am going with this. The question is what will the council think when they start getting laptops turned in with 30 gigabytes of adult content.

The second issue is what happens when you look at lots of free p0rn, spyware. Could this be the beginning of the next one million member bot net courtesy of the one laptop per child initiative?

While we are on the subject, how will the laptops be monitored? I am assuming it is up to the individual families to provide access to the Internet. But will the city place some sort of content filter to prevent to aforementioned problems? When you are taking this object into a private home, will doing something like this effect your civil liberties?

And what of the poor parents who get a call telling them that little Jimmy has placed an encrypted volume on the computer or hacked the computer in some unforeseen way? Are the parent held responsible for the actions of their children even though they were forced into giving their child a laptop?

The bottom line is I think giving every child is a great idea, you just better be prepared for what may happen. Knowing how city council members think, they may not expect any of these bad things to happen.

There is a new story on Slashdot (http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/10/22/1851226.shtml) today about an article (http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=5567) that could possible speed up password cracking by a factor of 25. ElcomSoft (http://www.elcomsoft.com/) has filed for a patent for a technique that uses both the CPU and GPU (graphics card) in a modern computer. ElcomSoft is a known software company that has specialized in selling password cracking software for many years. I have personally bought their software for the purpose of discovering how Yahoo! Messenger stores its passwords. Password cracking is a very shady area but it appears that ElcomSoft can actually be trusted.

The idea of using the GPU is not particularly new. The idea has been thrown around for several years but to my knowledge this is the first wide-spread practical application that has bee proposed. The science of cryptography has always been similar to the virus-antivirus arena. It is a rat race to one up the other side. It will be interesting to see which algorithms are susceptible to this attack and how the crypto community will react.