The first contest was a race to crack a DES-encrypted message, and distributed.net sprung up in an effort to harness resources from across the world and apply them to the contest. Over the course of the last year, d.net won the original RC5-56 challenge, and the DES-II contest, both sponsored by the RSA. Currently, d.net is working on RC5-64 and preparing for the DES-II-2 contest coming up July 13.

Within d.net, various teams are formed, based on religion, platform advocacy (hell, lump those together), business, or whatever. We decided to show the online community what kind of force the gaming community is-hence the RC5 Gaming Network.

Your incentive to help out comes from the fact that it's incredibly easy to get setup, requires no effort to maintain, helps RSA talk some sense into Congress concerning encryption, helps develop distributed computing, helps show how cool gamers are, and offers you a shot at some cash.

Hopefully this helps explain the basics of who we are and what we're doing. If you'll browse our site you should find answers to any questions you may have; if not, feel free to contact us and we'll help you with whatever problems you've got.

So go grab a client for your OS, and get cracking!